God of the Machine
by The Carnivorous Muffin
Summary: Upon entering the world of Death Note Anna Jones considers her survival and the prices she is willing to pay.
1. Chapter 1

"_The world is like a clock. Putting in an extra gear does not fix it; it's not always that easy. Often times that gear becomes trapped as it is dropped in, finding itself lodged between gears, and the watch stops altogether. Like a stone I was thrown into another world. As I fell I did not see the ripples I myself made."_

Light Yagami first noticed her presence as a whispering of papers in an artificial breeze. As if a book had been left open carelessly behind him and its pages revealed what it would to any who cared to pass. Later he would reflect that there should have been thunder, lightning, a crash, an explosion, something of monstrous proportion to signal what had truly happened. Yet, there was nothing only that subtle noise and the faint whim to turn and see what book had been left open.

Having been writing in the notebook he only spared a casual glance behind him and yet once the image registered his pen stopped. Sitting behind him was a girl, between fifteen and seventeen judging at a glance, with blue eyes that seemed a bit too large and red-gold hair loosely tied back.

She blankly looked back at him, her eyes blinking once or twice, she seemed to focus on something and tilted her head. Then her eyes grew slightly wider and her face seemed to pale as something in her memory registered and triggered recognition. He had never seen her before in his life.

For a moment they simply stared at each other without masks and without illusions. Him with the notebook so casually open upon his desk and her sitting there hands in lap clenching the fabric of her shirt tighter. What lies they might have said died as they looked and saw their own naked reflection in the eye of the other. There was no mistaking it.

She ran first attempting to dart past him and through the door. She fumbled vaguely with the lock looking behind her to watch as he rose out of his chair and threw himself after her. It was a desperate gambit at an illusion of freedom; they both knew she had nowhere to run.

So when he dragged her away from the door (her fingernails tearing at the wood and her screaming all the while) and tied her to the computer chair (kicking and struggling) her efforts were only vague and half-hearted. She had lost even before she bolted from the bed.

Light sat himself on the bed across from her and watched through half-lidded amber eyes as she in turn watched him. Distantly he noticed Ryuk hovering above him, a cold shadow borrowed from another world, he could also hear his laughter.

"So then, who are you?" He asked in a voice that harbored the reshaping of plans.

She blinked looking stunned and then looked around and back at him, "I…I…I… I really don't know why I'm here and I'm very sorry and this is…" She trailed off her eyes widening slightly as she took in the fact that his position had not changed. There were no illusions left for either of them.

It was strange how in a single moment both decided that lies were useless and that pretenses would get them nowhere.

"Who are you?" He repeated from the same seated position with the same expression.

"I haven't thought of a name yet." She said softly in a stunned voice and then her eyes growing wider she leaned forward desperately and said louder, "I'm nobody, nobody important, nobody you would ever know! Really, I'm just, I'm not even supposed to be here!"

I haven't even thought of a name yet, that put things nicely into perspective. She knew about the notebooks, the names, and that was almost everything.

He couldn't help but smile slightly at that, "You know everything already, don't you? You hardly even glanced at the notebook, all you had to do was look at my face, I think you know exactly who I am. You're a terrible actress."

She leaned back in the seat and tried to scoot it farther back, "Listen, just listen, I don't even know what I'm doing here. I have no idea why I'm here. It doesn't matter if I know who you are or not because I won't be here long because this is a horrible horrible nightmare and I will wake up any…" She trailed off and her face paled as she took in more surroundings and the fact that the room had not changed.

He stood then and walked over toward her standing above her. He lifted her chin so that she would look him full in the face. "Let's dispense with the games, alright? Since you've already made it this far."

She tried to look away but her eyes returned, "Games… I really don't know what…"

"Of course you don't." He responded evenly, "Who are you?"

She took a deep breath and exhaled, "Just a high school student, that's all." She closed her eyes and muttered silently with pale and twitching words.

"I too, am just a high school student." Light commented drily causing her eyes to open in a flash of terror. "Who are you really?"

"No, really, that's it. That's all." She insisted desperately, "I… There's nothing I can even think of to say!"

Despite the desperation there wasn't much struggling for freedom. Instead she just blinked and watched him as he stood above her not yet making her move. It was as if, while she was talking, she was playing another game entirely in her own mind. She was calculating, thinking of what to do where to go, and while she did so she had ceased to be in the moment. Desperation, she had already decided, would do her no good. She was probably right.

She was right on another count as well. She did appear to be just a high school student. Someone perfectly normal, nothing to look twice at, it was only the setting that presented the jarring image. She was only odd because she was out of context.

"Who sent you?" He asked looking at her through narrowed eyes. It was possible she was working on her own but anyone this reckless reeked of being someone else's pawn. Still, he couldn't think of anyone who would have known he was Kira in order to manipulate him.

"No one, I mean… No one I know." She paused and took a breath, "I really have no idea why I'm here. One minute I was somewhere else and then I was… Well, you saw… I don't…"

He cut her off, "Am I really supposed to believe that?"

Her face paled and she stilled only looking at him. It was a few moments before she said, "Yes."

"And why's that?"

"Because nothing else makes sense." She insisted in a shaking voice, her eyes drifted to the notebook and she continued, "You haven't had it long enough… No one outside of the Shinigami realm knows who you are and no one in there cares right now. You haven't been around long enough for anyone to care, not really, not yet. And why would someone send me, I'm too young, too inexperienced. I'd make a terrible spy."

His eyes narrowed and he lowered himself so that he was looking at her from her eye level, "And do you care to tell me how you know that?"

She shook her head and whispered her answer, "Because you didn't insist that L did it and because you haven't tried to kill me yet."

He stood and walked back to the bed and said with his back turned, "Kill you. That's a bit extreme. You know saying that makes me believe, well it makes me think that I should have reason to kill you. Do I?" He looked over his shoulder and then faced her sitting down once again.

She seemed to be at a loss for words in her sheer terror. Finally she managed to say quietly swallowing heavily in between words, "No… No, I, no… It's too risky. There's no need. You'd have to do it by hand and… There'd be nowhere to put me and… You won't do it. It's not worth it."

(Though in that moment they both must have pictured her slit throat gleaming from the light that reached through the cracks of the dumpster where he had stashed her body.)

"No, I won't." He agreed solemnly.

In that moment of silence Ryuk had shifted between them, peering down at the girl, beginning to cackle. He looked at Light in expectation but did not interrupt. His wings like canopies stretched over them both covering their faces in invisible shadow.

"You're right," Light continued after a small amount of time, "It's not worth killing you, as you put it, at least not today."

Her eyes had become steadily blank so that they only reflected his own face and that of Ryuk in front of her. She looked steadily ahead unseeing and unwilling to show any expression on her face. He couldn't help but wonder whether or not she was relieved or if she was wise enough to understand she had only bargained for a single moment of her life.

Light began to smile as he continued, "If you work for someone else I have no doubt that they will be stationed around the perimeter. As you said disposing of you would become tricky in that circumstance. You aren't wearing a wire, there's no cellphone, nothing has been recorded thus I have more incentive to let you live."

She still did not move, simply sat, staring at him with a face like a doll's. No thoughts present on her face so as to present him with nothing to face but a brick wall and an empty mask.

"However," Light continued, "I highly doubt you are working for anyone. Only someone working alone, in desperation, would attempt something as idiotic as you have today. No one would risk a spy so casually. I entered this room twenty minutes ago, the door has been locked since. The lock has not turned, there have been no steps on the staircase, the window is closed and also locked."

She said nothing but expression returned to her face a certain wariness that was less terrorized than before but still spoke of nothing but fear.

"You're in the wrong place at the wrong time but that doesn't excuse you. I think you and I both know that you won't be leaving until I decide just what to do with you."

He stood and untied the clothes that had been used to strap her to the chair. They fell wrinkled to the floor and dazed she sat there looking up at him with confused eyes. They narrowed slightly and she asked, "How am I supposed to stay here? What are you going to say to…"She trailed off and watched as he walked past her and toward the door.

His hand touched the silver handle and he turned to look at her with solemn eyes, "You're an exchange student from the United States. The student who was supposed to house you did not check with his family. Left alone at school I took pity on you and said that my family would be happy to house you while you remain in Japan. It would be dishonorable to abandon you now."

He opened the door and motioned for her to exit. She stood slowly on shaking knees, she brushed off her jeans as if to remove some invisible stain that had settled itself while she was tied to a chair. Her eyes watched him warily the whole time. She walked toward him slowly he looked down at her feet.

"Take off your shoes. They should have been downstairs already but in your haste to see me you clearly forgot, don't make my carpet any dirtier than it has to be." He said shortly.

She nodded and hastily did so clutching them in one hand as she made her way past Light. He closed the door softly behind them and followed her down the stairs watching her tense back as they descended.

It was that moment that he felt he saw her best. Later the vision of her would become muddled in too many emotions and lies to be clearly visible. She was best remembered as the nameless stranger who had arrived from nothingness and was travelling quickly to that same destination with only a few moments to spare for being in places she didn't belong. Anything more than that quickly became unrealistic and faded into the background as she stepped past him.

* * *

Nightmares ended. Nightmares got to the point quickly, there was only a small build up, the monster did not present himself only to have tea and a conversation. The monster did not make plans. The monster simply killed you, and that was the end. He slammed you on a table and drew a knife out to let you watch it gleam and then he brought it to your neck and you died. Nothing more. Nightmares did not continue at the dinner table with only the vague pit of terror in one's stomach.

In a dream the demon had no time for waiting and formalities such as dinner with the family were usually avoided for the sake of time.

She was beginning to suspect she was no longer dreaming. When she had stopped dreaming she didn't know (or when she had started for that matter) she only knew as she sat next to Light Yagami and across from Sachiko Yagami and Sayu Yagami that she was no longer dreaming and that reality had ceased to go away when she stopped believing in it.

She had thought it was an odd dream in the beginning, (why Death Note?), but she had been convinced that it couldn't be real. Light Yagami wasn't the usual choice for a villain, he lacked a villain's sense of dramatics and terror, but he was terrifying. He had no knives, no guns, no blood on his hands, but he was just as dangerous and just as terrifying as the rest of them. And just like any other monster he would kill her if she gave him half a chance and half of a reason.

She was riding the tide of the dream at the moment, making no movement, just waiting as it bore her along and letting it take her where it would. Whether that was to a dark alleyway, a warehouse, or Yagami's dinner table was for fate to decide. She was so sure that she would say something wrong and she would be eliminated only for opening her mouth. And he watched her out of sideways glancing brown eyes that categorized her and dissected her and left her in labled boxes.

It was more likely that it was a dream, too many things explained themselves, but it was the worst dream she had ever had by far.

"I thought she wasn't arriving until later," Sachiko said and admonished her son, "I'm sorry we would have made you more welcome if we had known you were here."

Outside the sun had just begun to set. The family was preparing for dinner and she was sitting in the middle of it all silent as a stone.

Light Yagami looked down at her with narrowed eyes apparently abandoning his own explanation for whichever one the family prepared, "Apparently the date was lost in translation, she arrived today, I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier but I didn't know myself until I got to school."

"Still, they could have given some warning." Sachiko said mildy, "I don't even have her room prepared yet." She shook her head as if greatly disappointed with the magical exchange program that only existed to provide explanation for her random appearance in their lives.

She hadn't known deus ex machina could prove so thorough even in a dream. Her dream had made up its own exchange program just so that she could have a place in her favorite serial killer's home. It made her feel so special.

Sayu smiled and asked cheerfully, "So, how do you like Japan so far?"

She turned her head and stared at the younger girl blinking and wondering what she could say. Sayu's face fell as she continued to say nothing be nothing. Eventually she said, "It's nice, it's… different though. I'm tired right now, from jet-lag."

She looked at Light then; watching him. He looked different in person. After that first initial shock of realizing just who he was she had begun to notice small changes. He looked more real in person, lines less definitive, and eyes that revealed almost nothing. His eyes seemed to cave in on themselves as if someone had painted many layers of watercolor on top of each other until all the layers began to bleed together. He glanced at her with those same eyes, only a slight hint of amusement showing, before looking back at Sayu.

Sayu nodded slowly accepting the explanation, "Yeah, I've heard jet-lag is a real bummer. You'll get over it though, and then we'll have to give you a tour of Tokyo! It's great, you'll love it!"

"Yeah," She said softly, "We'll have to do that."

It wasn't going away, no matter how much she told herself it wouldn't last, it wasn't going away. It was such an odd conversation, such a normal conversation, as if she herself wasn't even there. She was elsewhere, watching, not kicking, screaming, fighting, running like she should have been. They always run in dreams, as if it helps, because its instinctive but she couldn't run and so she was stuck alive and in terror.

Sayu looked at her brother, "Hey, maybe Light will come too! It's so hard to get him out and about sometimes but now that you're here…" Sayu went on but she tuned the girl out instead thinking about everything.

She wondered what they thought her name was. She wondered whether it was European or some stupid Japanese name that didn't suit her or perhaps if it was her real name. Or maybe she was supposedly from Wammy's and had a pseudonym that also didn't fit her, something like Myth or Nepenthe or Rainbow. She wondered if she would find out, if they would tell her, or if they would just leave her in the dark until the dream ended.

She was in Death Note. She couldn't tell if it was the manga, the anime, or something in between. She had been transported instantaneously; without trigger and without ornamentation. She had found herself sitting on Light Yagami's bed staring at Kira and having no idea what she was doing there. Kira had tied her to a chair and then had released her with a smile.

Kira should have killed her. She should be dead. But she wasn't, and Sayu Yagami was talking as if it was all perfectly normal. Light Yagami said nothing, he just watched her, as if trying to decide just what she was.

She should be dead.

There were fan written stories about girls who entered Death Note. They were found by L and they declared that they knew everything and helped the great detective win the day. They were quirky, witty, and often times very beautiful. They had great senses of humor and soon enough L would fall in love with them, sometimes Light would as well.

In the real Death Note those girls would die. Faceless girls lying head down in the gutter, having been too careless, too loud. It would be so easy to slip.

She wasn't one of those girls. She wasn't from Wammys, wasn't a psychic, had no special powers, or great intellect. She didn't feel particularly charming and in the instant she had arrived she had known that no lie would help her stop him from seeing straight through her. She had stared into the eye of the dragon and had been paralyzed by it. It was so easy to slip, so easy to be careless, so easy to think you know everything and pay for it with a bullet to the head.

She should be dead. She should be dead. Oh god, she should be dead.

"Hey," Sayu interrupted looking slightly annoyed, "Are you even listening to me?"

"Sorry," She responded without thinking, "Sleeping with my eyes open I guess."

She should be dead.

After a single conversation Naomi Misora died, even after all her precautions, she died. If he really had to Kira could kill with just a smile. It was thought that Kira couldn't kill with his bare hands but she had her doubts. He never had to before, it was just easier if you had a notebook, but she thought that if he had to he would. Light Yagami would kill his family if he thought he had to.

She should be dead.

"Sayu, I think she's tired. She should probably get some sleep." Light said saving her from yet another of Sayu's dubious looks.

She looked at Light then, nodding dimly, not thinking that the man who should have killed her already had offered her an out, "Thanks." She said and then made her way past the table.

Distantly in the background she heard Sayu say, "Man jet-lag must do some crazy things to people."

**Author's Note: I've decided as a personal challenge to do an OC Death Note fic with the OC Death Note plot and somehow turn it into a story that someone besides the author will enjoy reading. We'll see how this goes. In the mean time feel free to review and thanks for reading.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note**


	2. Chapter 2

"_I try not to blame myself for the beginning. There are things I regret as I look back down that dark tunnel of my fear wondering if one word could have made a difference. I think that my path was set the moment I was sent here, there was no saving me by that point, and that nothing I could have said would have made a difference. Still, sometimes I look back, and I want to curse every thought I've had and every thought I haven't." _

She was sitting on his bed again staring down at the luggage she herself hadn't thought to bring with her. She was looking at a passport in her hand and she was smiling and shaking her head. Staring at the picture of herself she sat laughing with eyes that had ceased to look at him and only looked at the farce presented to her.

Her eyes eventually lifted to his and she stopped laughing. She looked away at his desk where the notebook had been put away and only absent space remained. Yet somehow that emptiness held her attention as if it made no difference that the notebook had been hidden in a drawer, for her it would always be sitting on that desk.

"So then, what is your name if you don't mind my asking?" Light motioned to the passport she was holding.

The smile managed to hold itself though it dimmed slightly as she remembered his presence, "Anna Jones. It's just, you know, the way everything's been going I was wondering if it wouldn't be Ravenna Wingates Steele."

Light's eyebrows drew together as he tried to puzzle through that statement, "I wasn't aware that the name Ravenna was common."

"It's not." She agreed.

"So then why…"

Her smile grew in spite of herself, "Oh, it's an old joke from back home. When you come to a place a nameless stranger the name you're given always is a bit too long and a bit too flashy. General rule of thumb… I really was expecting to have to call myself something horrible when I found out that my luggage was already here."

They both regarded the large suitcase and the small backpack that held all the clothes she hadn't packed. They both regarded it suspiciously watching for some sign of forgery or error and yet it stubbornly remained luggage. Every hole was filled, every explanation made, and everyone left accepting and believing.

Light watched her from the door, the nameless stranger with every excuse to be there, and noted, "Yes, it does seem rather well put together, doesn't it?"

Seeming to remember the reality of her situation the smile disappeared. She looked as if she was caught between lines searching for the one he would take willingly. She settled on feigned ignorance once again, "Are you asking for my opinion?"

"Do you have one?" Light asked in return.

She hesitated her eyes drifting down to the luggage that hadn't been there before they left the room. She regarded it with as much fear as she regarded Light himself and yet when she looked up she still said nothing.

She paused and swallowed purposefully looking away from him, "No. When wrong answers get you killed you generally don't have much to say. I've found that, at least."

Light leaned back against the door frame his eyes pinning her in the room steadily, "That does not give me much room to move. This is too neat for my taste. You are either a very good liar or I'm being played."

She looked at him blankly as if not quite sure whether to follow or not or to remain oblivious. She looked like an inexperienced actor in forced improvisation who had just been given the gist of her scene and wasn't quite sure how she wanted to proceed.

Yes, he was certain that she knew everything, and that for whatever reason she saw no point in arguing against that fact. One look was all she had needed. One look at the notebook, at him, and she had run for the door.

"Being played?" She asked finally.

He looked at her with sardonic amusement wondering just how intelligent she was and how much she was hiding, "By someone infinitely more clever than yourself, but I think you know that. I think you know many things that you aren't willing to say."

"I don't know…"

Light interrupted her before she could continue watching as her features froze again, "Is it safer you think to feign ignorance? Or would it be wiser to let some of the truth slip through your lips and your expressions? We've started a game without any prelude, rules, or pieces and here we're already half-way through."

Light smiled at her and moved from the door frame to sit beside her on the bed. He looked at her and said softly, "There's too much about you I don't know but that's no reason to slit your throat in a back alley away from prying eyes. I don't think you're as stupid as you pretend to be but just in case I'll make it clear. Don't make it worth my time and effort to have you taken out of the picture, do you understand?"

She said nothing for a few moments, a steel fire burning behind her irises, and then said in a voice that spoke more than her words, "I understand."

He leaned away from her and looked to Ryuk who was strangely silent in the corner of the room, "Good."

He hadn't gotten a chance to interrogate the shinigami he wondered if it had anything to do with Gods of Death. It would be just like Ryuk to keep him in the dark about consequences of using the death note, or to arrange it himself behind Light's back just to see what made Light tick. He wondered if Ryuk had any idea what he had just done and what he would have to do to pay for those actions.

And then there was the girl. The girl whom Light suspected had been thrown into his world without prelude or warning. The girl who knew too much and was clever enough to realize what a terrible gift that was. She looked at him in terror that was almost pitiful, not even daring to implore him with her eyes, just looking at him as one might look at a wave descending. Fatalism, was the name of the expression in her eyes.

"You have too many secrets." Light said bluntly. She looked away then, from what she saw as her inevitable death, and toward the window where the night looked like any other and the stars were drowned out by Tokyo's light.

* * *

The girl who had decided to call herself Anna Jones tried to think of a practical means of escape. She was sitting alone staring at the television pretending to watch a soap opera while she attempted to think like Light Yagami. It wasn't going too well.

In order to outwit Kira one must first be on par with Kira, or so she assumed. Misa had done pretty well without the intelligence but she had possessed a weapon of mass destruction and a love-slave Shinigami; she suspected those helped quite a bit. Anna Jones had neither and suspected that everything she thought of Light had thought of first.

She wondered if she would have fared better if she was one of those made-up Wammy's girls from the fan stories she used to read. Whether Rainbow the great would have been able to talk her way past Light Yagami and defeat the big bad once and for all without batting an eyelash. Rainbow probably would have had allies, Mello, Near, L, and Matt and everyone would have loved her. She'd be just as intelligent and with a sense of humor would be able to successfully rub her intelligence in everyone's face with a witty pun or two to spare.

Somehow it never mattered to Rainbow that Light Yagami had been so good at killing that he had managed to avoid the eye-deal for five years. It didn't matter that Light had not needed L's name in order to kill him, he just needed time. Light didn't need the FBI agents' names in order to kill them, he just needed Raye Penber. Light Yagami would kill his own family if he felt he had to and they all conveniently forgot that when the time came. And Rainbow wouldn't have blinked, perhaps she would have even laughed at the thought.

Yet she shook with fear at the mere sight of him, alone in a room, with a pen in his hand.

She wished she could have been Rainbow instead. Anna Jones was batting zero so far.

The soap opera's characters began to take on new faces and new backstories. She saw her own soap opera which had been played out many times before. The story of the original character who becomes lost in another world, who fixes everything, deus ex machine incarnate and everything wound up fine.

"At least I'm still living." She said dully to the television screen. She didn't really believe it though because he was in the soap opera too, watching, just waiting for her to slip or a new opportunity to present itself. It would happen and then Anna Jones would be no more and all her hopes and dreams and good intentions would be for nothing.

Rainbow wouldn't have been worried about her imminent demise.

He hadn't asked, hadn't prodded, hadn't even looked at her since he had given her his little warning. He'd just stepped back and became a polite high-school student he always showed to others who laughed at her jokes and smiled when he was supposed to. Nothing more. He was waiting.

Nothing to do but wait and see, that's all she could do. She could try to run. She could slip out the window and jump from the balcony without looking behind her. She could run through unfamiliar streets and alleyways at night without a thought or a plan inside her head. She could run with nowhere to go and if she didn't find herself dead by morning then she'd find herself on some unfamiliar park bench wondering where Anna Jones could get her with nothing more than the sweat on her back and an unused passport. So she could run and find herself brought back to Light Yagami's tender care with more explanations necessary and more chances to try his patience until one morning she would find herself dragged out into the night while the steak knife smiled in Light's soft pale hand.

She briefly wondered what the police would say. If she ran to them. Told them she knew where Kira was and that he was keeping her hostage. (And tell them what exactly? That she was an exchange student in his house? That her passport was a fake and she was really from another dimension?) If she got past the operator what then, what if she got as far as Soichiro Yagami, would she get any further? No, the police hadn't solved the Kira case until Light Yagami was good and dead. In her case the police would be no help at all, running was better than going to the cops.

So she was stuck, on the couch staring at soap operas, trapped against her will in a glass bowl being watched at every moment until her performance was too lackluster for her captor's satisfaction. She was Anna Jones the exchange student and would be Anna Jones the exchange student for as far ahead as she could see.

Anna Jones would be starting school on Monday with Light Yagami, she would take classes and smile and attempt to make friends all the while ignoring the fact that she was sitting next to Kira and was the only one who knew it. All the while she would think about running, if it was worth it, if it was possible at all, and would remain trapped in the gold fish bowl.

She turned off the television, tired of watching the soap opera her life should have been, and turned to leave only to find herself sitting in someone else's shadow. She looked down at the floor noting the ragged black boots that could not have belonged to Light Yagami. Involuntarily her eyes drifted upwards until she was staring into a pale face with yellow marble eyes. She looked for a few moments seeing her reflection there, crouching, hiding, ringed in red with numbers dangling above her head and then forced her neck to move so that she would no longer be looking.

The words God of Death supplied themselves to the image without her prompting them.

She had forgotten. Somehow along the way, between the fake names and the insistence on ignorance and the sheer ability to just stay alive, she had forgotten about the shinigami.

She stood mechanically and began walking up the stairs to wherever her room had been placed looking anywhere but behind her. She heard it laughing and suppressed her body's urge to flinch and run.

She had forgotten that Light Yagami had a God of Death on his hands and that despite Ryuk's gambits for entertainment if she wasn't entertaining enough and if Light bribed enough it would be very easy to have an unfortunate accident. If she wasn't interesting enough she would die, if she let too much slip she would die, if Light tired of her she would die, if she went to the police she would die…

The word was out of her mouth before she could stop it, "Shit." She paused took a breath and then repeated herself, "Shit!"

The shinigami was laughing and she wished that she wasn't hearing it, couldn't hear it, could pretend that there wasn't one more player in the game she had to appease. No, game was Light Yagami's word, it sure as hell wasn't a game to her. She shouldn't use his words, his phrases, to describe her life and the choices she had to make.

She wished she could find a rock to throw in his window and watch the cracks weave into the glass by invisible spiders. She wished she could find a rock, any rock, and curse his name louder than anyone had ever cursed him before. Louder than Naomi Misora, L, Near, Mello, all of them even Matsuda. She didn't want a gun to point at his head, she wanted a rock to throw through his window, a thousand rocks so that one might shatter the glass so she could just go home…

All she wanted was to go home. That was all she wanted. She didn't want to be the detective Rainbow or anyone else who thought they were better than they really were. Leave saving the day to someone who had half a chance. Those dreaded numbers were dangling above her head as well and they could condemn her just as easily.

But Anna Jones couldn't go home, not yet, because she had been placed here with too many excuses too many reasons to stay. Anna Jones had some hidden task to perform and Anna Jones wouldn't let her leave until that task was done. Like some dread puppeteer Anna Jones stood high above her pulling at her strings and making her twitch.

She realized that she had stopped walking half-way up the stairs had in fact been standing there frozen for quite some time as her mind raced. Although she wasn't looking behind her (hadn't dared glance that way) and was in fact staring at the top of the stairs where nothing was waiting for her she felt the shinigami's marble gaze behind her. It was like thin needles being placed delicately onto her back, onto every inch of exposed skin, and just leaving them there where they gleamed silver threatening blood if she so much as moved an inch.

Light was right, faked ignorance wasn't getting her anywhere. It wasn't getting her killed but it wasn't making things any safer for her either. If she wanted to have surer footing under her feet she'd have to take a chance, jump across the gorge and pray her legs were stronger than they felt.

She didn't turn but said quietly hoping no one else would hear, "Hi Ryuk."

(The house seemed to echo with the syllables of that inhuman name.)

Behind her she heard something that vaguely sounded like, "Eh?" Ryuk seemed to wait for her to explain but when that didn't happen and she didn't move it began to laugh and asked, "So you can see me then or just hear me?"

"Both, I guess." She said.

The laughter continued and when she wasn't looking the voice almost sounded human like she was having a normal conversation.

"You know I've heard of humans with the sight before but usually they just get one thing. This one guy got the eyes but couldn't see shinigami, just life-spans you know, drove him nuts… He ended up lighting himself on fire actually, thought it would make him look smart."

She felt a chill and found herself staring at Ryuk's back. She watched as he turned so that he was facing her again, his feet two inches from the floor, just hovering there like some puppet that lacked the decency to have visible strings.

"Really?" She asked dully not feeling any curiosity at all but just dread, pure dread.

The shinigami grinned down at her looking exactly like a god of death would look, "So, why'd you start talking to me now, trying to keep secrets from Light?" It laughed at the mere idea of trying to keep a secret from Light, "Have to say, don't know how that'll work out for you, you're not doing well so far."

She attempted to shrug but it was far stiffer, bonier, than she thought it would be, "I know. I just realized that if I'm going to stay alive in the long run I need to have a good entertainment value for you. At first I was just taking Light into account… But that's not going to work in the long run because I need you to be on my good side more than I need to stay safe from Light. If I can prove to be entertaining enough to merit my existence it's going to be a lot harder for Light to bribe you to kill me if I become too much of a hassle…. If you get my drift."

They looked at each other in silence. Her, with a blank expression that desperately tried not to give away the terror or the fear that she had made the wrong move, and him with a slightly confused look.

Finally Ryuk said, "You think too much."

She blinked and responded, "Well when your life is on the line and you're abandoned in the home of a serial killer who would kill his family if he had to then it's usually best to think too much."

And Ryuk was on the floor in hysterics, or rather floating in the air like it was the floor, looking for all the world like a hyena who had just spotted its first dying and or dead animal of the night. She grimaced at the comforting sight of a grim reaper laughing at her rather desperate situation.

Finally he managed to splutter out, "Oh he is going to love you."

She didn't nod, didn't move, but only stood still thinking about what she had just done, the hints she had just given. She had too many secrets but now she wouldn't have enough of them, she'd have to explain eventually, and the explanation would give too much away. Not only the situation (the whos, the wheres, and the whys) but also what would happen if he tread down a certain path. She knew the rise and fall of Kira like the back of her hand and it terrified her. If he knew what she knew perhaps he wouldn't dispose of her but he might do something worse…

She stepped up the stairs through Ryuk refusing to think about consequences because she had been right. It had to be done, in some respects Ryuk was more important to appease than Light, Light was more terrifying but Ryuk was a god of death and she should never forget that. She had announced herself as a person of interest and a possible source of entertainment and that was what was going to keep her alive. She did what she had to.

But at what price? What price had she paid to keep herself alive a little longer?

How much did she want him to know?

Did she want to tell him the truth? That she was from another world, a world in which his life had been scripted in black and white. A world in which his story dictated that he had been shot to death in a warehouse under the supervision of all the king's horses and all the king's men who wouldn't bother to put him back together again. And to learn that every choice he would instinctively make, everything he did, had already been recorded and drawn in delicate detail. Everything from the piece of notebook in the watch to the sacrifice of the director of the NPA to Mello, every little thing belonged to someone else, not to Light Yagami…

Could she get away with telling him half? That she could see Ryuk, knew everything about him so far, a bit about L, but nothing else…

How much had she already told him? She couldn't quite remember only tasting the fear and the desperation and the bolt for the door that had been locked. She could only remember him staring at her across a chasm dissecting her for further analysis...

Perhaps he already knew, but if he didn't then he'd pick up on it fast enough from Ryuk or from somewhere else.

She had the dreaded feeling that all her excuses, all her lies, all her attempts to outmaneuver a self-proclaimed god were only a sad attempt at fooling herself; as if she had painted her face to become Anna Jones and had thought that a bit of red paint might convince the world of her new identity.

There really was only one thing she could say to sum up the situation, "Shit!"

**Author's Note: Well there you have it. Thank you for the reviews and for reading, it's all wonderful. Feel free to leave more reviews, because they're always great. **

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note**


	3. Chapter 3

"_Did I bargain with the devil? I don't know. The beginning was a rush of adrenaline and terror and near death experiences. I suppose the nature of my agreement and terms with Light Yagami will be for someone else to decide. Still, with a gun in my face and my hands tied behind my back what choice did I have?"_

Light Yagami liked to think of Anna Jones as a rough mask that had been whittled down and smoothed with general wear and tear. Each time she spoke, moved, woke up, walked she shaved down rough edges and tightened strings until it would no longer fool just the extremely near-sighted. Each time her blue eyes would tighten, become for a moment slightly brighter, and she hesitated for a few seconds (each interval grew shorter as time wore on) and answered in Anna Jones' voice.

Anna Jones was a high-school exchange student from the United States who was (as far as Light could tell) near if not fluent in Japanese and taking classes at Light's high-school as a part of her program. She spoke in a confident manner, conveying her emotions with opinionated expressions, and often made dry comments that were sometimes funny and sometimes not. She wanted to tour Tokyo with Sayu before she started school so that she could see what was happening on the other side of the world. She said the right thing at the right time and treated everyone the way they should be treated given their assigned roles.

However she wasn't always fast enough, sometimes the mask named Anna Jones slipped a little and the other girl looked out instead. The other girl, the one he had met first, was far more calculating and careful than Anna. She paused and waited and always weighed her words and actions carefully on a scale of her own design. She wrote out her scripts at rapid speed and revised at an equally brisk pace. In the beginning the revisions were obvious. Each time the other actors' attention wandered there were her eyes staring at the table, running over the lines and the synopsis, scratching out words here details there…

Would it serve Anna Jones better to be shy or to be outspoken? A shy girl would unlikely travel all this way by herself without friend and without a contact to her past. A shy girl could hold her peace better and think before she spoke but if Anna Jones was brazen enough no one would look twice. If Anna Jones was noticed, liked, it would be that much harder to explain her absence. And so Anna Jones became charismatic and humorous in an instant and her jet-lag of the previous day had been forgotten.

Still, Anna Jones would always be a mask, nothing more. Anna Jones always stopped her jokes a little short of the mark, always stopping a little bit away from that edge that could be deemed dangerous. She rarely spoke or noted anything about Light that couldn't be noted by an idiot and when she did let words slip by the mask had been removed completely and only the sheer terror remained. For Light only the eyes behind the mask counted, the ones that watched and waited for the sunset that was sure to come.

Anna Jones did not seek out Light but when the girl who wore her face as a mask came to talk to him he was not surprised.

(Although Ryuk's actions had been a big give away to a changing scenario. Ryuk had been laughing the entire morning. Every time he saw her he burst out into hysterics. Light had only looked at him debating whether it was worth asking or if he would find out eventually. Light was waiting to grill Ryuk until he could get more information from the girl, it would be difficult to get Ryuk to cooperate later if he started asking questions too soon. Besides, the laughter indicated a surprise and the Shinigami was terrible at waiting for the punch line. If Ryuk could hold his tongue so could Light.)

It was interesting to see how rapidly the mask was thrown away when it proved fruitless to wear it. She didn't replace it instead she wore that same frightened blank mask that he had seen before. The face that watched and waited and showed blatant thought but not the actual nature of the thoughts themselves. It was like watching hands on a great clock spinning at a rapid pace, far faster than natural, and trying to make out which unseen cogs were responsible for the spinning.

She was going to start school on the next day and seemed preoccupied with finding her school materials and dictionaries but couldn't help looking over her shoulder every once in a while. Looking over her shoulder eventually brought her to Light Yagami's bedroom door.

"Did you want something?" Light asked as he ushered her into the room watching for the usual signs of Anna Jones, the stuck out chin, the blazing eyes and the defiant posture but she seemed to be lacking energy and instead opted for being herded into a corner.

She looked at the room then, differently than the first time, still with that edge of fear but with something harder as well. She watched the room as if waiting for it to change, to become brighter or darker, and reveal its true nature. It never did.

She looked at him and said in a voice that only seemed collected, "Has Ryuk told you yet?"

(And there it is, he thought as he looked at her, the missing punch line.)

Light's eyebrows raised slightly and he spared a glance to the shinigami attempting to piece together why Ryuk would show a piece of his death note to this girl who knew too much, how he was going to make sure it never happened again, and what he was going to do with the girl now that it was blatantly obvious she knew too much.

She didn't flinch, didn't tremble, but he could tell behind her eyes that her soul was cowering. Good, then, at least she knew how much this cost her. He could feign ignorance and make her go away until he could think of a better plan but that seemed too little too late and from the look in her eyes; she would go but it would not be easy to convince her of hallucinations. He could do it though, get enough hallucinogens in her system and she wouldn't know what was real anymore. After all she was already partly convinced it was a dream… Perhaps it'd be easier than he thought… That would solve things nicely.

(An image appeared in his mind of the girl staring blindly into the distance, her eyes consumed by pupils, and pale hands twitching. Through glazed sightless eyes she stared at him and he knew that had he slit her throat those same eyes would be staring back at him with that same soulless expression.)

However there was another option; honesty, blatant barefaced honesty. If he silenced her now the information was gone. Whatever she knew and where she knew it from would be driven into madness and addiction and he would never find it. The threat on skin surface would be eliminated but what about the unknown beneath, ridding himself of her would be ridding himself only of the mask, not of the true power beneath. He could afford to wait a little longer, give her a little time, and eventually he'd hear the truth from her.

(He noted how unsurprised he was, as if he had expected her to see Ryuk all along, and that this was another predictable step in the game. Just another step he had already mapped out before him, another thing to be taken care of then brushed to the side. She had already known about the notebook, him, and Kira why not Ryuk as well? Light might even have called it predictable; it certainly followed the pattern. But then again Light had never truly been surprised in his life, everything for him was predictable. Even the notebook itself had not been surprising… Still there was something anticlimactic in the way he solved this problem without blinking an eye.)

He gave a slight smile as he settled on his new and untried tactic, "No. He hasn't."

She looked slightly surprised that he didn't pretend to know nothing as if she had been expecting a different answer. Honesty appeared to be new and unexpected for her as well. The script was rewritten in a moment, the cogs turned, the hands on the clock face moved and she spoke again.

"You know I'm not from here." She said slowly looking him in the eye carefully, those desperate scales weighing in her eyes.

"I know." Light said with a smile, "Your passport says you are from America. Or are you referring to that other place you are from?" He looked at her with a more sober expression wondering just what she was handing him and how seriously he was to take it.

"I'm not from your America." She said quickly as if it hurt her to do it, "I'm from another universe. A parallel universe."

"What makes you say that?" Light asked, "Your spontaneous arrival?"

She looked at him judging, weighing, looking at the edge of the cliff and judging how far the water was below and if she wouldn't be dashed to pieces by rocks if she jumped. He was curious as well, it was somewhat entertaining, watching her try to wriggle her way out of the trap that some mad and sadistic god had placed her in.

"Partly. There are other things though." She said shortly looking at him and taking a breath before continuing, "You know that I know more than I should. That's obvious. The reason I know those things is because I'm from another universe."

Light stared at her, the way her eyes blazed, as if she had said something particularly damning and waited for the wave to finally crash over her and drag her to the pits of hell. Yet, Light thought, it wasn't that surprising of information. Looking back he had known for quite some time that she was from another world but had never felt the need to formalize it as a thought, it had seemed so terribly obvious.

He stared at her, the inter-dimensional traveler, and responded, "You're very good at telling me things I already know. That's not the secret you've been trying to keep. I'm not interested in where you're from and neither are you, it's what you know and how you know it that concerns us. You knew the danger to your life not when you looked at the notebook but when you looked at me. Ryuk didn't hand you a piece of the notebook either, he may be an entertainment addict but that would be a bit rash when things are still this hectic, you saw Ryuk on your own." He paused and watched as her own actions came back to hit her in the face.

"So, did you come up here to continue to tell me things I already know?" Light asked.

Sheer panic entered her eyes and she immediately twitched toward the door. She managed to compose herself before all out sprinting for the door and a way out of the labyrinth.

She took a breath and began again, "Not everyone from my universe would know about you, about the notebook, or about Ryuk. I guess I'm just lucky." She paused here and gave a small derisive laugh while her eyes bled.

"Why are you lucky?" Light asked moving closer to her and watching as she took a step back.

She appeared to be deciding something at rapid pace. Deciding whether to tell him, deciding whether she wanted him to know what she knew, and deciding whether she could survive on her own if the world outside would accept the false name Anna Jones or if her fickle god would send her right back to his open arms.

The light went out in her eyes as she realized the truth, looking at Light's face. Her fate had already been decided, she would stay or she would die, there was no in between. She knew too much to be set loose and there was nothing Anna Jones could do or say that would make him free her from the cage. The best she could do was make herself of value, any kind of value, so that he would not have quite as much incentive to silence her.

"There's a story where I come from. It's called Death Note." She paused looking at Light with dead eyes, "It begins when a shinigami named Ryuk drops a notebook into the human world and a human named Light Yagami picks it up."

He thought about the notebook then, hidden in the false drawer, and the words scripted across its cover. It was the glazed look in her eyes that extinguished his doubt and he found himself believing that in another world he had been written on paper.

He supplied the implications for her, "It's my story, then."

"Yes, but there are others involved too." She looked away from him, "It's mostly about you though."

Light hesitated before asking running over her previous conversations in his mind, "You mentioned L and how it was early… how did you know when I had picked up the notebook?" Her face fell as she realized the names she had dropped previously condemning her to this conversation sooner or later. She must not have realized, in that panic of her arrival, what she had given him.

She looked blankly at him, "You weren't being a paranoid bastard enough about it. Have you met a man named Lind L. Taylor yet?" She asked in return her eyes weighing his.

"No." Light said honestly with no hint of confusion.

"Then it's very early. People are just beginning to notice, the newspapers are covering it up but on the internet sites are popping up, they call you Kira and you aren't thrilled at the prospect of being worshipped as 'Killer' but it's better than nothing. You'll appreciate it more later. Right now you're just waiting for the cops to make their first move and for everyone to acknowledge your existence as more than coincidences." She said and as she did so her eyes dulled as if she were listing off mere facts that had no place in discussion.

(And so she knew everything that would happen, as if it was written, and could foresee every turn in the future as if they were only words. To her his life was nothing more than a tale of morals intriguing but flat and two dimensional.)

If he believed in shinigami notebooks and gods of death who drank the life spans of humanity he might as well believe in a parallel universe where his life had been scripted for him. It seemed a more reasonable explanation than he was expecting considering that she knew far too much and had appeared out of nowhere.

Light looked at her with no expression, "Interesting. Is it a good story?"

She looked at him, a light of curiosity beginning to glow in her eyes, "Does it matter?

He smiled in return and said, "Yes, if it was good you would be more likely to pay attention."

"Oh." She said slowly looking at him with something other than terror growing behind her eyes.

He cocked his head and observed her, she seemed to be waiting for something, some sort of request or statement on his part. She looked unnerved that he would say nothing and just leave her sitting there with no more than a single question.

Finally she asked in a horrified whisper, "Aren't you going to ask me anything?"

(They shared visions then of a girl tied to a chair, her pale limbs shivering, blood dripping from her nose and running down her neck, and her eyes like twin stars staring down at him in the dawning horror of the newly fatalistic. And a question followed bringing a dreaded silence in its wake…)

He couldn't help but smile as he realized that despite being smarter than average she was still reading off of an improvised script, "No. You've made it clear that whatever you do know about me you find me to be very dangerous. To be frank I don't trust you. I have no way of judging the information you have to be true or not. Even if I were to torture you I doubt I'd have enough time to get the information I want without someone interrupting. Besides, I'm not experienced at causing immense physical pain; I may go too far and leave you saying only what I want to hear. Not to mention that even if you were to tell me all you know it may no longer be accurate. If you are from another dimension and have now entered my world what makes you think the story has not changed already? A butterfly flaps its wings and it causes a hurricane on the other side of the world; you may have already changed all you expect just by being present. Faith is not a familiar concept to me and I don't think I'll try it out on the first inter-dimensional traveler I meet."

Her look of horror drifted into one of confusion until she said, "You know, I really thought you would ask."

He only continued to smile at her knowing that if he ever was truly in need of information he could buy it from her. She continued to look at him, slightly puzzled, and she stood to make her way to the door. When she reached the silver handle she turned back and said in conclusion, "You really don't trust anyone at all."

His smile dimmed and he regarded his reflection in the pale blue of her eyes, "I suppose that is what's going to keep me alive."

She didn't respond that he should be worried about his future or that everything would be fine but her eyes held shadows of things to come and he found them more unnerving than he liked to say.

* * *

Anna Jones found herself staring at the Sunday paper in slight confusion. She was looking headline and realized that it was in Japanese and that she couldn't read a word of it. This wasn't surprising she didn't know a word of Japanese but it was something of a reminder. The reminder was that she didn't speak, understand, write, or read a word of Japanese or Chinese. Someone could plaster the phrase "I am a jack-ass" onto a shirt and sell it to her claiming to be a declaration of peace. She would never know the difference.

She looked over to Sayu who was watching a soap opera with Ryuga Hideki on the television. Instead of tuning out the monotone and bland plot she listened in and found herself understanding words. She looked at the screen scanning for subtitles in funny characters she couldn't understand. They were curiously absent.

"Sayu," Anna said in a loud enough tone to grab temporary attention from the fourteen year old.

"Yeah?" She asked in return her eyes still glued to Ryuga Hideki's golden features.

She tried to think of how to phrase the question without sounding weird. Perhaps she could pass it off as a mistranslation. Words that got mucked up but sounded better in the original language, besides Sayu was distracted by Asian-anime David Bowie and wouldn't be paying too much attention to what she said… It would still sound bizarre.

"Are we speaking Japanese right now?" Anna Jones said haltingly.

"What?" Sayu responded either out of lack of hearing or lack of understanding.

Anna wondered if she should suck it up and admit what a bizarre question it was or just press through to get her answer. It didn't seem like it mattered since she seemed to be communicating fine. Still, for Sayu to be as fluent as she seemed in English by the age of fourteen… And the fact that Ryuga Hideki while clearly on an Asian network was talking like he was from England was a bit alarming.

She found herself fighting down the urge to go ask Light. Over the course of the day she had found it tiring to be in utter terror of him every time he entered the room and then pretend not to be in utter terror by cracking horrible jokes to Sayu. Her body eventually gave out half-way through the second day of her imprisonment and just decided that if she was going to pretend to be normal she might as well be normal. Of course, she still mentally knew he was terrifying but the fact that she was relaxing in spite of this terrified her even more. This was what happened to Naomi Misora: he exhausted her to death.

Still, with Light there were no pretenses he probably wouldn't think twice about the question. That was the frightening thing, there were no masks, as soon as someone made it slightly easy for him she was kaput. By proclaiming herself to be an interesting person with supernatural knowledge and a mysterious past she had sidetracked Ryuk enough so that he shouldn't be a problem unless Light got very heavy on the bribing but that wouldn't stop others. She had also given herself potential worth to Light and he might keep her alive just for the reserve

She still had Misa to deal with. Only a few months and Misa would come in out of nowhere and proclaim her undying love to Light. What would happen then? Would she move out? Would Light let her leave when the time came now that he knew what she was? And then, where would she go if she left?

Perhaps she should take to wearing a mask and become a vigilante; Tokyo's new batman the almost detective Rainbow whose secret identity was Anna Jones foreign exchange student from a parallel universe. Maybe she'd just wear really big sunglasses and pretend to be blind…

She was getting a headache from all this thinking. This, she thought, must be how L and Light feel and this is why they're insane.

She got up from the table and made her way to the couch to sit beside Sayu and watch as Ryuga Hideki seduced another woman on screen with a rose in hand and a charming smile on his lips. She felt curiously relaxed and found herself thinking that if she drove her poor brain at a speed worthy of competing with the likes of Kira and L then there would be nothing left of it by the time she really needed it. Perhaps it was best to take things as they come, keep an eye out for signs, but to sidestep catastrophe only when it was at her doorstep.

No one had really had that attitude before so it wouldn't be as if she was Takada or Mello or even Misa. They'd all had stupid idealistic reasons for their decisions. No, she was more like Matsuda. Who even though he was depressed, had shot his boss whom he admired greatly, and destroyed his world view had at least been alive at the end of all that shit.

(The detective Rainbow wouldn't be worried about wearing down the cogs in her head to oblivion.)

Anna Jones decided that soap operas were more interesting than whatever the hell her brain was coming up with, "So what's the beef here?"

"The beef?" Sayu asked probably wondering if Anna's ability to communicate was breaking down. Beef was a weird way to say plot but Anna was tired and just talking to Light exhausted her.

"What's going on? The problem? The plot? Why is that man so attractive?" Anna asked pointing to the dazzling Ryuga Hideki.

"Um… I don't know?" Sayu said her eyes never straying from the screen.

"You've been watching this for a few hours; if you don't know the plot no one does."

"Well, he's a wealthy heir and playboy but he has a mysterious past and an evil twin brother but the twin isn't in this episode and he's met this woman who…"

Anna smiled and nodded as she listened realizing that soap opera plots, while more ridiculous, were much easier to stomach than the Kira investigation. Still, it loomed in her mind, all the things to come and her own place in them. A butterfly flaps its wings and it causes a hurricane on the other side of the world, Light had said. What earthquakes had her footsteps summoned when she first stepped outside of his bedroom door?

The time would come though, when she would hear them rumbling, and know that it was time to outwit the gods. Until then she would wait, rest, and accept her survival for what it was and watch as the rising wave descended upon her.

Although she was still wondering about the Japanese thing.

**Author's Note: Because let's face it, trumping the language barrier is always this ridiculous. Anyway thank you for reading and reviewing, input is always great and is always good to note that most people are as frustrated with the general fandom as I am. Reviews are appreciated feel free to leave some.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note. **


	4. Chapter 4

"_Was it my responsibility to save those who were innocent in Kira's reign of terror? I don't know. That's the ultimate truth. Say what you like but we'll never really know my true role in this place. The original character has no script, no destiny, and no mark on the road she has chosen to take that will lead her out of the woods." _

They walked side by side from the school. Without the obligation of maintaining the illusion of being a normal American exchange student Anna Jones had gratefully dropped the act of being Anna Jones and had not spoken a word since Light met her on the campus. She walked beside him in her new uniform with a frown on her face as she deliberately did not look in his direction or Ryuk's who was in hysterics behind them. Ryuk was thrilled with whatever malignant god had placed a hapless girl in Light's bedroom with too much knowledge and too much of an imagination forcing her to realize what that knowledge meant. Instead of a show of just one Ryuk now had a show of two and got to watch how Light managed to outmaneuver a seventeen year old girl without having the police investigating him for homicide that wasn't Kira's.

Light and the Shinigami had been alone in the room after Anna Jones had left to return to her life of saying ridiculous things in front of Sayu in order to pretend to be just a normal exchange student. Light had continued to stare at the door even after she had left his mind's eye watching as she descended the stairs looking back with that dubious expression that wondered how many mistakes she had made in one evening.

"So, what are you going to do about the girl?" Ryuk had asked Light when the room was steeped once more in shadows.

"Wait." Light said and made his way to the desk to find the death note waiting in the drawer.

"Wait? That's it?"

"Yes," Light said as he drew out the notebook, "I'm going to wait."

Ryuk laughed and extended a claw to point at Light, "Isn't that a bit of a risk, Kira? Having someone who knows all your deep dark secrets under your roof?"

Light gently placed the notebook on the desk reading the gold lettering on the cover almost instinctually before turning to the computer and drawing up the internet. Through the reflection he could see Ryuk's leering expression and hungry marble eyes.

On the computer Light began to sift through faces, names, and histories, "She's not enough of a threat to warrant that kind of a reaction. Besides, what kind of a man would I be if I killed a seventeen year-old girl for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?"

"I thought you were all about making sacrifices for the greater good." Ryuk noted and crept closer to hover behind Light's shoulder.

Something in the shinigami's tone caused Light's hands to still and his head to turn to give Ryuk a more pointed glare, "It would be a waste to kill her when I know nothing. I don't know why she's here, I don't know how she was brought here, I don't know how intelligent she truly is and how much of this farce is her acting talent, and I don't know if there will be others. If I kill her now I will always have to look back over my shoulder and wonder if she could have been of use."

Ryuk grinned at Light saying nothing and as he did so Light's eyes narrowed and he folded his hands together determined not to let the cold rage seep through his fingers. It wasn't worth discussing morality with a god of death and Light could see no benefit from that particular conversation.

"But maybe you can answer some of my questions." Light noted switching topics, "This seems much too convenient to be put on without your help."

"You mean the girl?" Ryuk asked seemingly surprised by the shift in conversation.

"Yes, I mean the girl."

"What? You think I brought her here?" Ryuk asked in a stunned voice.

"Not necessarily, but it's an option. You also could have arranged it." Light's eyes continued to narrow as he regarded the shinigami watching as his smile slipped away and he began to move on the defense.

Ryuk held up his hands in front waving off Light's baleful stare, "Look, Light, we don't do that kind of thing. Believe me if we'd had anything as entertaining as a human kidnapping service do you think I'd be here? The best they have up there is gambling and even that gets dull after a while…"

Light interrupted the shinigami, "Am I supposed to believe that some other higher power transported her here for its own sadistic sense of entertainment? Even you must think that sounds contrived."

"Hey, why not?" Ryuk asked, "I was just entertained by having you around, didn't even think you needed an audience member or an assistant or whatever the hell she's supposed to be."

"And why the hell should I believe that?" Light asked softly watching the raven with the clown's face as its grin returned.

"'Cause you've got no choice. You can't make me tell you and I don't see anyone else around. You're just stuck asking the girl and you're going to have to live with it."

And on the computer screen the name and face of a rapist awaited him, staring back out of sunken dark eyes, and in them Light thought he could Ryuk's own reflection and wished his pen would reach far enough to kill the gods.

His thoughts were abruptly interrupted by the voice of the girl walking next to him pulling him back into the present where he walked home from school with the exchange student, "Light, when we were first talking the other day what language were we speaking?"

She seemed taller than he remembered, perhaps it was the daylight, and walked in a more brisk hurried fashion than she had on the way to school. She looked desperately out of place in the school uniform and seemed to want nothing more than to sprout wings and take off running. Still something of Anna Jones had snuck into her expression and there was a determination that had been lacking when he had first met her.

He felt his eyebrows lift and glanced at the girl next to him who was staring straight ahead with a determined look on her face, "Japanese."

"I don't speak Japanese." The girl responded shortly more as an insistence than an actual belief as if she had been told all her life that Anna Jones doesn't speak Japanese when in fact she had never attempted it.

"You're speaking it now." Light noted.

Her frown deepened and her pace became slightly faster as if walking far enough and fast enough might bring her back to the place she came from.

"No, I think I'm speaking English because I only know about four phrases in Japanese and twenty-five percent of those came from the Terminator." She sighed, "It seems that whatever mystical entity brought me here it didn't want to bother with the language barrier."

(Light took that as a small sign that Ryuk may have been telling the truth. Light could never see Ryuk putting that much effort into any endeavor, he might have found it more humorous to leave the language barrier intact and watch how Anna Jones stumbled her way along.)

"That explains why you sound so fluent." Light noted, it had seemed rather odd that a girl who didn't seem to have a Japanese drop of blood in her body should be fluent complete with idioms and all at the age of seventeen.

Light continued to walk and then asked, "Did it teach you how to read?"

"No. It didn't. If it had I wouldn't have bothered talking about it. I probably wouldn't have even noticed, honestly. There have been more important things to think about than my ability to communicate in another dimension. Do you know where I can find an English to Japanese dictionary?" She asked abruptly as if remembering that despite the fact that she was playing Anna Jones she shouldn't talk to men who could kill her with a name, face, and a pen without anyone being the wiser.

"There's one at home." Light said offhandedly, "So how did you manage to get through the day without reading a word of anything."

Her eyes grew blank and she stared at him as if he had sprouted horns. The idea of small talk with Kira must have been contradictory to her but she managed to swallow eventually and get out a few words.

"Well, it was um… Math was okay, English was also okay, everything else kind of sucked…" She trailed off and sighed looking away from him to the buildings that trailed their walk home no doubt remembering her attempts to bluff her way through the Japanese alphabet.

"Are you asking for my help?" Light asked still watching her out of the corner of his eye.

She seemed to struggle perhaps wondering if Anna Jones was too prideful or too well-versed in Japanese for help. Or perhaps she was judging the merit of receiving aid from Yagami Light who very well could be plotting her death. Eventually she seemed to concede defeat and responded with a soft, "Yes, please."

Something about the nature of their play the roles they had taken on caused him to smile. Their half-hearted attempt to play the game of charades handed to them failed to fool even themselves. Light Yagami and Anna Jones new friends walking home from school talking about their day and asking each other for small favors. At a distance it was almost belieavable.

He wondered if he should extract a price immediately or let her wait until he was in need of some other favor. He had no true reason to help her. No, he was only there to watch the fly struggle her way out of the web as the spider's jaws descended. Say they found out she was illiterate, there'd be a more extensive look into her background, and there were bound to be holes if the great omnipotent god that sent her failed to make her Japanese enough to understand the language. If they found out they would send her back, back to some place far away where no one knew her and she could never return. His little witness gone without a trace of blood or ink on his hands…

But then she was also clever. How much had it cost her to ask Light? How much had she bargained away in the scales hidden behind her eyes? Anna Jones might be illiterate but Anna Jones was already an improvised mask and Light always had to wonder how much was Anna Jones and how much was the girl beneath. It was getting harder to tell and harder to see how those wheels spun inside her head.

There was nothing less she could do in America than she could do in Japan, the world wasn't as small as it used to be and Light suspected that her ill-mannered god would not give up his game so willingly as that. If he attempted to rid himself of her the god might simply transport her back with a new fake passport and a better ability to read the language. Not to mention that she had already given Light incentives to let her stay.

She had known that she had no place to go back to and had made a leap of faith letting him know her value in the game. She had made it difficult for him to simply abandon her to the wolves and had made it worth his time to keep her in play. She still had cards up her sleeves and he would have to be more patient than that to see them played out before him. It was a longer poker game than he intended and with a foe he hadn't been prepared to meet but he would play all the same.

"Yes, I'll help." Light responded with a cheerful smile. She frowned at the expression and averted her attention to the horizon once again abandoning Anna Jones when she no longer proved necessary. Light supposed he was the same but he hoped his abandoned cheerful personality was much less blatantly neglected at the slightest excuse and opportunity.

He wondered if she would ask what he wanted in return but that didn't seem to suit her. She thought about instead, those wheels in her head spinning, until some new idea was formed and took root in her revised script.

He wondered distantly if she would be right. He had yet to know because that favor had yet to be asked, but it would be, one day and she would have to display her poker hand for all the players of the game to see. One day the charade and the mask would fail her and she would have to play a more honest game.

Until then however the charade remained and Anna Jones attended high school.

* * *

She had forgotten about Kira; or misplaced him, perhaps.

Walking home from school in a language she didn't understand with a man she didn't trust she had forgotten about Kira. It seemed something so blatant and obvious and dangerous that she could never forget it. Apparently survival had taken precedence of morality, she had known but in her own way she had let that knowledge slip her by.

She had forgotten about L.

She wasn't near Light as he watched Lind L. Taylor die on public television. She had left him to lounge on the couch in front of the family's television. She hadn't necessarily forgotten what it was he did in his spare time but she had put it aside in her mind as if it didn't really concern her, perhaps in trying to play at innocence she had actually managed to succeed. Then she saw Lind L. Taylor and she remembered.

She watched as the great detective L announced himself. Watched as he challenged the madman called Kira whom the public wasn't even sure existed. She watched all of it, every bit of it, and she did nothing. Thought nothing.

It was a show.

The truth was that Lind L. Taylor didn't need to be publically executed under false pretenses. That was the show. The headliner to show the public that there was indeed a Kira and that the war was on. L had enough evidence to pinpoint it to Japan (and from there to Tokyo with sheer population), had enough evidence to show that Kira killed with a name and a face, he had worked on less evidence before. No, it wasn't to get evidence. It was to prove a point and to provide entertainment. Kira, the best thing since Cracker Jacks.

What had Lind L. Taylor done to be the unannounced victim of the death chair? What had made him so convenient that he would lay as a dead anchorman for all the Kanto region of Japan to see. Why had Lind L. Taylor needed to die so shamelessly?

Was it because Light couldn't control his temper? Was insane? Had to one-up the great detective L before the race even began? He'd kill everyone just so that he could win his pissing match with L. And she knew that neither of them would give a damn. The world would be charred and burning all around them and there they would be, declaring war over national television.

But then, hadn't she already known that?

And then she saw why she blamed them. She was blaming herself. There was nowhere else to turn. Anna Jones could have spared Lind L. Taylor the shame of a public execution. He would have died regardless but she could have spared him this. Anna Jones could have said something, done something, done anything besides the nothing that she allowed herself. She could have run upstairs the instant she saw Lind's stern face and said anything that would stop it. She did nothing, because she was a coward and because she was lazy.

She had let him die. Not L, not Kira, but she, the nameless stranger, had let him die. She had effectively murdered Lind L. Taylor for lack of trying.

She watched behind glazed eyes as the gothic L appeared and promised Kira his execution and she counted another body's worth of blood on her hands. L, who would die at Light's behest if she did nothing. How many others would there be? The twelve FBI agents, Naomi Misora, Watari, L…

She leaned back on the couch saying nothing feeling the tears well in her eyes numbly. It felt as if everything had stopped, everything had stopped rushing and pounding in that realization. She was left staring into the abyss, into nothingness, as she realized her own true nature.

She had watched him die and said nothing.

"I let him die." She said softly to the empty space around her seeing only the blood and the body. Saying it out loud made it thicker, the sound stuck in her throat until she was choking on it, sounding as if she had given her divine permission to Kira to dispose of Lind L. Taylor.

She had been standing by the dumpster as Light dragged his body into the alley way, she had stepped aside and watched as Light lifted the lid, she had seen the slit throat and the blood dripping down his body and had said nothing. There was nothing to say. Nothing to be done. Lind L. Taylor was dead and she had let him die.

That was the grand truth of Anna Jones. That was her true purpose. Stay out of the way and make sure your neck doesn't get chopped off. Never mind the bodies, never mind the blood, never mind the glazed fish-eyes staring up at you. Just look down and keep looking down and don't ever…

"Oh God." She heard herself whisper and brought her head into her hands feeling tears begin to leak out of her eyes.

She should be dead.

Her breathing had become harsh and what started as simple tears turned into horrified sobs as L's speech on the true nature of Kira continued. As he spoke she saw everyone, everyone she would condemn to die, saw them smiling and walking away and then their bodies staring up at her. She saw each of them and knew that it would be worse the next time and then the time after that and…

She should have died first.

She missed the dream, that feeling of fatalism, that she could do nothing to change anything so she might as well go along for the ride. Where was that feeling now? It was still true wasn't it? Wasn't it goddamn true that she could do nothing?

She sobbed harder pulling her head into her arms and rocking back and forth and seeing them all dying before her until she was the only one left. She'd be the only one left…

"Why should this be my fault?!" She screamed at the television, standing abruptly and falling over herself until she stared at that accusing gothic L on the white screen, "I did what I had to!"

The L disappeared leaving her standing with blank eyes at the television. Leaving her alone, as she always would be, until there was no one left. She dropped her head and ignored the return of the news station staring at the floor which contained all the eyes of the people she would kill by doing nothing.

"I can't do this; I can't keep doing this…" She trailed off shaking her head and bringing her hands to her ears so that she could hear something other than the useless chatter of the television.

Lind L. Taylor wasn't the point he was a symbol of things to come. It would be harder when she actually cared. It would be harder when they didn't actually deserve to die. What would she say when Light took that fateful bus ride to Space Land? What would she say when he took a bag of laundry to his father at the NPA building only to find Naomi Misora there instead?

Could she live with herself with so many dead bodies in her garden?

(And there would be so many bodies, too many to count, each one just passing her by as she said nothing and did nothing on their way to empty graves.)

"No." She answered. Her hand took up the remote and she turned the television off wishing to see none of their frantic reports of the dead Lind L. Taylor and the war between Kira and L. Yet even with the television off she still heard them, arguing and debating in the background, and she wished they would all just shut up and leave the dead in some form of peace.

Yet, somehow she knew that despite her own misgivings and horror she would wake up the next morning with that same unresolved feeling in her stomach. She'd forget the instant Light looked at her again with that musing expression wondering whether or not it was time to feed her to the wolves. It'd be Anna Jones and her survival again, nothing more, and nothing less.

In the end Lind L. Taylor was still a drawing in a book to her and she had the feeling that he would always be black, white, and dead to her.

(And all of them, dead, would look up at her, and she would feel nothing.)

**Author's Note: Because getting trapped in the world of Death Note would suck horrendously. No matter what anyone else might think about OC insert fics. Anyway, thanks for reading and reviewing they're all great. Feel free to review, criticism's always fine and usually I do what I can to fix the problems. **

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note or anything else I happen to mention. **


	5. Chapter 5

"_I am all the false names I've given myself. I am all my masks, all my lies, and all my charades. Yet, I am nothing real. I am a figment of my own callous imagination." _

Outside the leaves had blown off the trees and the scent of winter was in the air. Through the glass the sky loomed overcast and the light seemed trapped inside the window, unable to make the full passage into the classroom. Light Yagami stared back at the trees thinking of a black notebook left unnoticed after falling from the sky. His ears however, belonged to a conversation that had the pleasant seeming of irrelevancy.

"So what's it like living with perfection?" A girl asked Anna Jones in the middle of homeroom managing to squeeze her way into a conversation with the exchange student.

Without looking Light imagined Anna brushing back orange hair from her pale face and blinking at the question; appearing slightly confused having been lost in her own labyrinth of thoughts only a second before. He imagined her pulling herself back from the constant grinding gears in her own mind and the terror that waited beneath a dazed and distracted expression.

"Living with what?" Anna responded in a vague confusion which comes when one isn't really listening to the conversation.

"Light Yagami, smart, handsome, athletic, just… perfection. It must be interesting. What's he like? I've never really talked to him myself but…" The girl trailed off waiting for Anna to respond, there was a pause that was slightly too long.

"I guess it's interesting, frankly though he's not really my type." Anna confided in a clear voice that was a little harder than it should have been.

Light imagined a look of slight shock on the questioner's face and then a small smile as she began to assume the thought process.

"You're kidding right, with that face?"

"I'm more into the Clint Eastwood type. Light may be pretty but he just doesn't kick ass enough for me to consider him."

There was a pause where Light imagined the girl's blank stare of confusion as she tried to remember who or what Clint Eastwood was. She evidently failed because she soon asked another question.

"Who's Clint Eastwood?"

"Never mind." Anna sighed and then departed back to her own bitter musings.

She was distracting herself. He could tell. Anna Jones was slower than usual today, something had caught in her mind and would not let go causing everything to become a little slower a little less realistic. She still sat, pretended, put on her puppet shows but there was something in her expression a depth of thought that had always remained hidden before. In her laughter there was now a cold ringing, a desperate note, that he hadn't heard before.

Something had changed.

(Something had broken.)

Something had caught between the clockwork causing the hands to turn slower and slower. The desperate script which she had so carefully attended lay neglected with her pen pausing above, dripping ink carelessly on virgin pages. There was some thought, with Medusa's face, that had turned her mind to stone the moment she stared at it.

His head turned and he glanced at her seeing a single beacon of red hair and emptiness in a sea of shallow happiness felt by those who have never known true terror. Yet ,in her own eyes, the nothingness remained.

In his mind he heard her words echoing through dark vast hallways of thought, "Have you ever met a man named Lind L. Taylor?"

He remembered the night before and watching her from across the room he found himself reminiscing on moments best passed over. He remembered standing before the television, notebook in hand, watching the gothic L appear. He remembered the silence as L proclaimed war against him and his cause and his own stunned silence. He remembered his eyes drifting to the door that would lead him down the stairs to where the prophet waited.

She had known, she had known all along that Lind L. Taylor would appear on public television masquerading as L. She had known that Light would kill him. She had known Light's mistake before it had even happened and had carefully avoided telling him. She had allotted the first victory to L.

He remembered turning the television off and finding himself downstairs looking down at her as she sat on the couch; seemingly unaware of his presence. She had turned to look at him not blankly so much as with a dull resignation; Lind L. Taylor's corpse still slumped over in her eyes. He remembered having said softly to come up with him, that they had things to discuss, and turning as soon as she stood. He had led her up the stairs until finally the door closed behind her and he looked her in the face.

"You knew." He said (he remembered wonderment in his voice as if he hadn't truly believed before that moment, in spite of what she said, and a distant hint of betrayal as if he had expected better).

She had no response, she only managed to stare at him out of eyes that held no expression, only dead. She leaned against his door and then began to slide down until she was sitting on the floor staring straight ahead into empty space.

Light continued, "You knew from the very beginning."

He gave a small laugh, seeing himself falling right into L's trap, and she had known all along. She watched him dimly, from a distance, as if she still watched through the medium of the printed page.

(This, he thought as he remembered in the classroom, must be what it felt like to talk to God.)

He walked to her until he was standing above her looking down and said in a harsh voice, "Why didn't you bother telling me?!"

There was no response, she stared at his shins in indifference, her face remaining an immobile mask.

"You knew he was going to die. You knew about L too. Well, is this some cheap ploy to get me caught? Get me cornered?" He grabbed her shoulders and dragged her up until she was pinned back against the door, he leaned in forcing her to look him in the eyes, "Need I remind you of your true status here? You're nobody, you don't even have a real name, nobody would miss you if you slowly but surely faded out of existence. You think I can't kill you, you're wrong, it just takes a little more time and a little more planning but rest assured if I have to, if you give me incentive, I will kill you."

The old fear began to return her face shaken but still in a small whisper she said, "I know." Her eyes began to water slightly and she repeated in a slightly louder more desperate voice, "I know."

(Light's smile drifted from his lips until he lost sight of it completely.)

He remembered her first appearance and the words that had tumbled out of her mouth in a desperate gambit to stay alive. He asked then, "Do you want to die?"

At that she looked up and as she did so Light could see the wheels behind her face turning in thought, "If I had told you who Lind L. Taylor was would it have made a difference?" she asked slowly.

"What do you mean?" Light asked in return still pinning her against the wall.

"If I had told you that he wasn't L would it have made a difference?" Her voice became louder more assured and her eyes took on a more confident glint, "Tell me, would it have stopped you for a second? You weren't thinking, you just did it, regardless of who he said he was. If I had told you it would have changed nothing!" She pushed him away from her then looking at him in desperation as if grappling with a spark of hope that she had not been expecting. A bitter smile, knife sharp, began to grow unexpectedly across her lips.

"Besides, why would you have ever listened to me? What reliability do I have for you? There's nothing I could say that would make you believe I was telling the truth. In fact if I had told you it wasn't L you probably still would have killed him just in case he was. Win win situation, show L just what he's messing with if I was telling the truth and eliminate your arch nemesis if I was lying. There was nothing I could have done! Absolutely nothing!"

She staggered back against the door and began to laugh breathlessly as she looked at him standing alone in the dark. Was there something of pity in her expression then, or was it only his imagination?

She took a deep breath and put her hand on the door knob leaning on it and shaking her head in disbelief, "So believe me when I say that I couldn't have done shit!"

And yet, Light thought to himself in the classroom, here we are.

In retrospect he had lost nothing to L in that first moment, perhaps a few minutes of humiliation, but nothing more. Kira would survive unhindered, if anything it brought more reality to his presence than before, no one would doubt now. Kira had become a reality, had given the world unshakeable proof, and he had L to thank for that.

(In fact it offered Light a challenge, a definable goal, a game between two adversaries that could not possibly have been replicated. L in his declaration of war had triggered something, more than just a vision for Light; he had offered Light a path to salvation. L needed to know that Kira was real and Light had given him that, in turn Light had needed a definable point of victory and L had given that to him.)

In retrospect things seemed much more clean-cut than they had appeared at the time. And yet, Light Yagami thought.

Anna Jones and Light Yagami hadn't spoken all day; they both more pensive than they should have been. The incident was nagging at Light; it showed too many holes in his planning for his comfort. He had underestimated his desire to have information, the siren's lure of the predictable future, and yet becoming dependent on the future told by a young girl was to become prey to information outside of his control. But then, there was more, something else. It was her expression when he found her, looking at the television screen. It was if someone had stripped her of all her thoughts but left her an empty face that she could show the world in place of anything human. Something, perhaps in her eyes, had seemed particularly jarring.

He wondered why that was. Why should it matter to him what the witnesses saw, or rather what she saw? Why did he find himself remarking upon the cracks in her mask, not to exploit them, but rather to merely observe their existence?

What significance did Lind L. Taylor have other than being a corpse?

(And on the lawn there lay a black notebook unnoticed by all except one…)

After the bell rang and classes ended Light found himself breaking the silence. He walked over to where she was sitting and stood by her desk. She looked up at him with eyes that were more mistrusting in public than they should have been.

"Shall we go?" He asked his eyes sliding away from hers to look out the window once again.

Out of the corner of his eyes he saw her nod hesitantly.

And there they were, with so many things left unsaid.

* * *

"Why does it bother you?"

She hadn't been expecting him to ask.

The Light in the manga had been so very alone, so very indifferent to the world around him, he had never thought to ask. He had never thought twice about the opinions of those around him unless they could be played for or against him. That's all people were to him in the end, something to be assimilated, nothing more.

This one, this Light, did. He looked at her with more attention than he had ever given to anyone who hadn't solicited his attention first, whose opinion wouldn't change the pieces in the game, who had no purpose to be exploited. Light never sought anyone out, he waited for them to come to him, and they all did eventually.

"What?" She asked for clarification, though secretly she knew the question.

"Lind L. Taylor, why does it bother you?"

Her thoughts stopped and she remembered the dead man, the desperation, and all the blood on her hands. It wasn't an interrogation, he wasn't asking as if he would have the answer no matter if it broke her in the process, it was a whim. A whim with narrowed eyes and a cocked head as he sat casually in his computer chair watching the girl sitting tensely on his bed.

The words didn't come right away, "I saw a man murdered on national television. Why shouldn't that bother me?"

She heard the smile in his voice, an amused thing caught unaware on his features, "No, that's not it Anna Jones. It's more than a man, a desk, and a public execution. You've seen this all before, you even told me his name… No, it's something else for you, something deeper. What is it?"

She turned to look at him slowly, "Isn't a dead man enough?"

She felt his eyes then, and thought that in his mind he was laughing at her, that he was looking down at her from silent smiling eyes while his mind was in hysterics. Finally, he responded for her in a soft voice that neither pitied nor respected but simply stated, "Not for you."

(That hurt more than it should have, that he looked at her, dissected her, and all he found was this: that one man's death shouldn't have been enough. She wanted to say that he was wrong but then...)

Light continued over her own turbulent feelings, passing over them like some giant god who had momentarily blocked out the sun, "What is Lind L. Taylor to you, if he isn't a corpse? What is so much more terrifying than a dead body?"

"You killed a man on national television simply for challenging you!" She shouted, "Why isn't that enough for you?!"

He looked at her strangely then, as if she was saying something so obviously wrong that he wasn't quite sure how to process it, "Because that's not how you think, that's how Anna Jones thinks, how everyone else thinks. To you though, I am a given, I am inevitable, I am that I am and nothing you can do or say will ever change that. For you there's no need to intervene because intervention will lead to your death. It's as simple as that, except when it isn't."

She wondered what it was he thought of her, what impression she had given him, in order to stay alive how much had she sacrificed that Light Yagami was willing to admit her own ruthlessness, that she had earned this heartless opinion in only a matter of days. Light knew that she had let Lind L. Taylor die and had seemed to think it perfectly natural that she should intentionally allow Light to kill him. He had seen nothing worth doubting in that, no, it was her reaction to the event that had him questioning.

She didn't know what to say.

"Why do you even care?" She asked instead. The fear inside her was a slowly draining abyss eating at her soul day by day and yet it had grown so much less urgent, so much less necessary, that she could look at him and only think of how tired she felt.

Although he continued to look at her he did not answer the question but rather simply stared his fingers casually tapping out a rhythm against his desk. She wondered if she could simply get up and leave, walk out, or was she somehow bound to him as surely as he had been bound to L with chains.

The fear began to rise again as she realized that she had followed him willingly into his room, not by thinking that he might kill her if she didn't, but because she had thought of no reason not to. It was as if she had somehow come to belong in there, that it was perfectly natural for her to just accept a summons from Light without question. She knew he hadn't wanted anything, not anything important, why was she still there? Why had she bothered staying?

And then she knew. It was because there was no one else, when Lind L. Taylor had died she had found herself alone. There was no one else; not really. Sure, there were others (she had talked to them at school) who had been horrified by the prospect of Lind L. Taylor's death and Kira's sudden appearance but they didn't truly understand the magnitude of what had happened. No one did.

There was only her and the god himself. In that moment she had been robbed of all illusions of ever fitting in, finding a place beyond Kira, because for her there was only Lind L. Taylor and his death.

There was no one else.

"How much do you know?" Light asked his voice breaking through the silence of her thoughts like a steel hammer.

"What?" She asked drawn back into the present moment sharply.

"You said that you knew my story, how much do you know?"

She was surprised at the amount of contempt she managed to feel, she wondered when she would run out of energy to feel anything at all, "Why? It doesn't mean anything. It won't change anything. I'm untrustworthy information, I'm the big glaring hole in the universe, I'm too interesting to let loose but too unknown to take advantage of."

He didn't respond but merely continued to look at her with that almost indifferent expression. Those analyzing eyes that stripped her down to pieces and then through her naked remains into the trash outside the window… She had forgotten how much she despised him.

"Why even bother asking?" She demanded.

Something in that question caused Light to smile slightly she suddenly had the feeling that he was suppressing laughter. There was something in his eyes that she hadn't seen before, a distant amusement that flashed briefly in pools of amber.

She wondered if he even cared that he was laughing over the death of a man who had died for nothing. Did it even cross his mind?

"You didn't strike me as an existentialist." Light explained, still with that slight smile.

She blinked, that was… curiously random. She wondered if her language barrier was rebuilding itself as magically as it had blown itself apart. She couldn't have heard that right.

"What?" She asked, feeling as if she was repeating herself. His amusement seemed to grow and he glanced at the apples left on the desk that would eventually find themselves in whatever form of a stomach a shinigami had.

"I, myself, don't subscribe to the philosophy but then I haven't been transported to another dimension against my will and placed in the tender care of a man who seriously contemplates killing me at any moment."

She felt that stunned silence of not understanding again and asked, "Are we really talking about existentialism?" She then paused and added as an after-thought, "I'm not existentialist."

"You ultimately believe in only the futility of your own actions, you believe that you make no significance difference upon the universe, and that everything is outside of both your understanding and your control. However, this is only another mask, these are beliefs you've impressed upon yourself to cope with the world I'm creating. You don't really believe them. You chant them in your head every night, like prayers, and think that this might make them true. You know it doesn't. And that's why you stared in horror at the television screen as Lind L. Taylor died. You realized your own pretenses and self-loathing."

And there she was, dissected, the blood a red ribbon flowing from her lips, her arms splayed out as if in prayer to some unknown god, her body naked and pale as she awaited salvation with eyes closed and head thrown back in the garbage can.

Her own pretenses and self-loathing, how had he managed to word it so well?

She felt the words leave her but she did not say them, "If you already knew then why did you even ask?

And his answer came to her like distant church bells, ringing over some unnamed funeral. It was a soft almost gentle affirmation of the abyss growing beneath her and with it she felt herself fall from the roof top slowly, voluntarily, and stare with wide eyes at the disappearing world beneath her.

"Because I have never seen a person so completely and utterly alone in the world."

**Author's Note: I really have nothing of importance to say this chapter. Thanks to both readers and reviewers, everything is appreciated. Reviews are always great. **

**Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.**


	6. Chapter 6

"_The truth is that I understand him no better than you."_

In duller moments Light wondered at the nature of existence, fate, and divinity. They were the moments when the rain slid down the windows painting a gray-scale bleeding world where his hand ached softly as if it were a reminder of the dead.

With eyes closed, lying down on his bed, he listened to the persistent tapping of rain upon the window, an incessant series of beats ringing throughout his ears. Inside a notebook several names had been written, and beside their names times and dates, and beside those lay the invisible thought of the faceless detective whose name was only a letter.

L.

In order to get closer to the detective he must reveal pieces of himself. A little here, a little there, to narrow the search so that L might come close to what he was looking for. Not too close, a little to the side, so that Light could see his features through a window as he walked by. Not close enough to stare him in the whites of his eyes, but to see them glance in his general direction as he made his way through the street.

He wondered when the implications would sink in.

When would L see what was so terribly obvious? Not the timing of the events, the people killed, but the nature of the responses to his decisions. When would L acknowledge the rat beneath the floor boards?

He was certain the man already knew, but digging out rats in a room full of men filled with fear, bitterness, and resentment of an outsider's presence was not an easy task. Eventually though, the need to secure information would outweigh the benefit of tact. Eventually L would have to clean out the police force and in turn he would burn his bridges as they grew to resent him.

And there they were, Kira and L on their respective sides of the game board, waiting for the other's move.

The waiting always reminded him of the girl who lived in his house, watching soap operas and doing math homework while cursing the dictionary that didn't help her learn grammatical structure or conjugation. He thought of the dullness in her eyes and knew that to her, these necessary steps, these precautions and layers meant absolutely nothing.

She paused above the game board, glanced at it in a somewhat bored fashion, and then turned her attention to the two adversaries. It was they, the two across the board, that she would stare at for any period of time. Her thoughts would turn inward and in her gaze he would see some mistake, some flaw in his thinking, as the universe slowly but surely turned against him. (Nothing more than a simple game of chess between two armatures who thought they were playing god, that's all they were to her. After all, it was her second time watching that very same game.)

He had been fighting the urge to ask what came next. Logically he knew that she had no reason to tell him the truth and he would have no reason to trust it as being true or false. There was also something else, some emotional chord within him struck when he thought of his life scripted by a middle aged man in a darkened room. He was afraid that his thoughts and actions could very well be those written on her pages, and he would never know the difference. What a nightmare, to only be the daydream of some mortal god.

Shinigami had not seemed so terrible. Light found, after the few seconds of horror of meeting Ryuk, that he was not entirely surprised. After all, why wouldn't the gods feed off the life-spans of humans and be otherwise indifferent to their fates? Didn't that seem more natural? Light had always expected either non-existence or sheer indifference from whatever deity ruled the universe. If such a being existed he had always expected it to be focused on the pattern, the physics, the macroscopic, and the microscopic not the fate of men. It would be so terribly arrogant to assume that the deity bothered with the politics and trivialities of human life.

Or so he had thought.

The universe was not supposed to be whimsical. Before she had arrived he would not have considered it prone to lapses of judgment and yet there she was, out of nothingness, staring at him in horror. She had appeared out of some invisible black hole to sit blinking on his bed (as if the universe had simply misplaced her or accidently nudged her into a different position). Just as a black notebook had once fallen out of the sky she too fell unnoticed into reality.

His mind spoke an errant thought in those moments, a small thing that had nothing to do with his own goals or aspirations. A simple sentence of both wonderment, terror, and a distant sense of pity. Had her god, like Ryuk, only dropped her out of boredom?

Was she only here to suffer, to see what made Kira tick, and to watch as he came to the realization that in some other universe he was no more substantial than a drawing on a page. He was less than the idea he presented and whatever he thought belonged to him in fact belonged only to ink and a man's idle thoughts.

What thing could have condemned her to that?

(Yet, in the pit of his soul he knew, he feared had feared ever since her arrival that he lived in a world already written by some petty ineffable god.)

He opened his eyes and they wandered to the notebook now hidden away in a false drawer. They rested on the drawer for a few precious moments seeing beyond the wood to the black leather cover that waited beneath.

"Ryuk, how did the shinigami come across the notebook?" Light asked suddenly interrupting his own deteriorating thoughts.

"Hm?" The shinigami asked.

"Did you invent it?" Light turned his head away from the drawer to look at the shinigami who hovered as some dark shadow beside the window.

The shinigami turned toward him, "Does it matter?"

"Yes." He said without hesitation (though he felt that there should have been some, if only to save face).

The shinigami wore its customary grin as if mocking Light's ignorance and sudden desire to know where his tool of achieving godhood had originated, "No one kept track, sorry Light, but to us it didn't really matter. We don't care, just as long as they stick around."

"There it is then. So terribly convenient, isn't it?" Light said returning his gaze to the closed drawer.

"Feeling philosophical today, Light?" Light only distantly heard the familiar laughter afterwards. Light grunted in agreement eyes still on the drawer.

"It still bothers me." He admitted finally, "Anna Jones is unnatural and yet, she seems to fit exactly in the scheme of things. A notebook that gives life through death to a rotting civilization with no purpose or direction and a girl who plays the powerless prophet who is condemned to watch the same play twice. I'd almost call it a theme."

"You still don't think I sent her, do you?" Ryuk asked taken aback by the sharpness of Light's tone.

"Please, even you're not this nihilistic. No, this isn't someone having fun, seeking entertainment. It's someone proving a point." Light sad up and ran a hand through his hair turning his eyes from the drawer to stare at the handle of his door instead.

Standing to leave he said one final thought to the room, "I'm being played."

* * *

She wondered how it came to this. At first she had thought it was some insane god with a sick sense of humor. Then she thought that perhaps she had just been driven insane. And then she realized that if she had been driven insane even her crazy brain wouldn't have sunk so low as to place her in a hostage situation with a serial killer.

(Seriously, didn't most people just hallucinate talking animals or something? She could have dealt with a talking panda; in fact she would have loved a talking panda. So long as the panda wasn't a secret serial killer with aspirations of becoming god she and the panda would have become great friends. As it was she got Light instead, who was neither a talking panda nor a person who refrained from murder in cold blood.)

How had the universe turned so precisely that it placed her in Light Yagami's bedroom standing over his shoulder as he translated an essay into Japanese for her?

Light Yagami didn't even bother to look as if it was difficult, every once in a while he'd pause for a moment and then rewrite out the corresponding character but overall seemed to hardly be paying attention to the paper in general. Next time, she thought to herself, she was going to put in the most ridiculous words that couldn't possibly have a neat translation just to force him to actually have to look at a dictionary.

"You do know that at one point you're going to write in-class essays." Light commented drily as his hand continued to write.

"Well then, I'll just fail those essays by sleeping through class." She responded irritably.

Light's pen stalled and he turned slightly so that his eyes caught her; they seemed rather flat as if he had a hard time understanding that concept, "You're going to purposefully fail in class assignments by sleeping?"

"Considering the circumstances I think God will forgive me if I fail high-school in a foreign country." She noted with a somewhat dull resignation attempting to ignore the fact there were beginning to be more Japanese characters than English meaning that Light was in fact adding to her paper and probably making insightful additions at that.

"I can see that your high standards of underachievement reach every aspect of your life." Light said beginning to write again.

She felt her eyebrows lower and she glared down at Light Yagami, "My high standards of underachievement? What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

(She could have been sent anywhere. Why not Ouran High School Host Club? That would have been nice. Hell, she could use some Host Club, sure she'd fail high school there too but at least no one there openly discussed throwing her in the dumpster as a lifeless corpse on a daily basis. Maybe she'd have to cross dress or do something bizarre but she could have handled being Mulan rather than whatever the hell this was.)

This time his pen did not merely stall but stopped altogether, he set it down on the page and turned fully to look her in the eye, "You know perfectly well what I mean."

She unconsciously then turned to see if anyone else was in the room. Sayu was out shopping with friends, Sachiko likewise had run to do errands, and she barely saw Light's father even at night. Even though she was in that locked room, caged in with the tiger, she always felt as if she was being watched had to guard her every word just in case he felt she let too much slip. She always tried to catch herself but the terror was ingrained, instinctive, and she couldn't shy away from it.

Turning her head back to his, watching his hard eyes that seemed no longer concerned over petty essays, her own eyes narrowed.

"Not getting myself killed is a little different than admitting that I don't know jack shit about Japanese." She said, a hard edge creeping into her tone.

"So then, you did sacrifice his life for yours. How many others are you willing to let go?" Light asked bringing up a hand to count, "One more, two, three?"

"Stop it."

He didn't though, his eyes kept blazing, and he kept speaking and asking. He kept asking the same questions she had been asking herself every time she woke sweating from another nightmare of Lind L. Taylor's agonized expression as he collapsed, that instant where his face stretched itself until hairline fractures appeared everywhere on its surface.

"How much justification can you handle? How many times can you tell yourself that you could do nothing? How many public executions of Lind L. Taylor can you stand to watch?"

"I said enough!" She screamed at him, breathing hard. He stopped, looked at her, and smiled slightly.

"You have changed." His expression changed and a small almost compassionate smile appeared on his face (it was wrong, that expression didn't belong there, it was inherently degrading only a mask as if he had seen the true thing and thought himself a mimic), "The old you wouldn't have said a thing. I think a little bit of Anna Jones is creeping into you after all."

She said nothing, only looked at him, watched him stare at her and move backward toward the table, watched him smile.

"That's good," He said picking up his translation of her work his smile never slipping, "We need change."

"What change?" She asked wishing to back up, but she had nowhere to go in the end. Why not hear it from his own lips? Why wait for the surprise? If she was going to die she wanted to hear it first.

His eyes traced his own rephrasing of her words, resting on each character in order, "I'm being played. I don't particularly like the thought of some distant being manipulating my life for sake of a supposed moral high ground."

She broke her silence then, "What do you mean moral high ground?"

Light simply glared at her as if to say that such words weren't even worth saying, "Please, a notebook that kills people mysteriously falls into an idealist's hands, a prophet whom no one hears shouts warnings and moral statements. All centering around a man who attempts to change the world through good intentions if unjustifiable means. If one is looking at this, at me, from the perspective of an outsider reading a story then any audience member can predict that my story will not end well."

He looked away from her and the papers, staring into some unknown void, "To be condemned to death before I've even begun, well, it's rather disheartening."

And to think in that other world he had not believed for an instant that he would fail. Even at the end of it all he had died screaming denials. "Why do you think that? I never said how it ended."

His voice was distant, softer than it usually was, "That's true, you've never said it. You've made sure to avoid any topic regarding my future. More so than you did for L or for Lind L. Taylor. Perhaps it's simply because you don't want to give me anything to my advantage, perhaps you fear my suspicion of being fed false information… I think those are parts of it but then, I think perhaps there's more to it than that."

"You're wrong." She said her tone a hard stone falling against the earth, "I'm not that complicated. Some things, Light, you do take at face value."

"You've never said a word about my success or my failure, not a single thing, all I know is that you knew Lind L. Taylor would die, that L would become my rival, and that I am not a thing to be reckoned with. You've been more careful than I've suspected, haven't you?"

She almost grimaced, "I've just been staying alive."

He nodded, "I know." He began tapping his fingers on the table, "But as hesitant as I am to place my faith in anything other than myself I find myself never the less tempted. I refuse to be the citizens of Troy, burned alive simply because they refused to listen to a mad prophet, believing themselves to be masters of their own destiny."

"So what do you want then?" She asked with narrowed eyes, "Because you're wrong, nothing has changed."

Light shook his head, "Oh but it has changed, there is a god, somewhere out there beyond my control. Evidently though he's changed his mind, because he's sent you. I can't plan ahead if I have no direction, even if you lie to me it will at least give me a direction. Besides, I doubt that Anna Jones will allow too many more bodies to fall in her place."

She narrowed her eyes and felt a rage that she had not felt in weeks, being too terrified to move or feel anything other than terror and exhaustion. He looked at her with that satisfied smile, as if he could own her soul with only words and vague threats. And so casually, so very casually, he laid the guilt upon her head as if he viewed himself as some inevitable force of nature that was only to be deterred but not stopped. In the end, Light Yagami blamed her for Lind L. Taylor's death.

It turned out, go deep enough, push hard enough, suffer long enough and there was a point where her soul simply said no. She would not be blamed for this, not by him. If Light was going to kill fine, there was nothing she could do, but he would not blame her for it.

She made her way out of the room, not turning to watch the change in his expression, only pausing briefly at the door speaking before thinking (or perhaps thinking that solitary blinding thought of no, the instant refusal, that brooked no argument).

"I want something clear between us, Kira. I am not to be held responsible for your mistakes." She turned slightly to look back at him eyes burning, no, not anymore, no, "In the end it's you, and only you, who holds that notebook and it's your handwriting, not mine."

**Author's Note: Because if we really think about it Lind L. Taylor's death was horrifically traumatizing and guilt is a terrible terrible thing. Anyway, I enjoy this, a lot. Thank you for reading, reviews are wonderful, even complaints about OOCness, although I hope not because I try very very hard.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note.**


	7. Chapter 7

"_You do realize that even I don't remember the shit I say. I may have known him better than anyone else but that doesn't mean that I am him. I really don't understand why anyone bothers recording anything I say. Perhaps we all settle for things in the end." _

Time passed almost without his realizing it. After the Lind L. Taylor incident Kira was everywhere. He was on the radio, in the newspapers, in the magazines, on the street, in the very air they breathed Kira existed and burned bright. Always Kira and L together, battling it out beneath the public eye as they had on that televised incident not so long ago, never a moment of silence. Even those who still claimed, but with little conviction, that he did not exist discussed him incessantly. His name was everywhere these days.

There were only two who remained immune to the contagious thought. The Shinigami and the girl, the alien visitors from other dimensions who merely deigned to observe. Ryuk took it in as a part of the game while the girl just watched with tired eyes. A little of Anna Jones slipped now and then, when Kira came up among others, her eyes would take on that haunted shade that belonged to the girl who thought too much and spoke too little. At first she had joined in the debate over Kira, whether he was right or wrong what she thought about all of it, but gradually she had stopped and would instead look out the window of the classroom to watch as the leaves on the trees began to disappear.

"Maybe I'm just tired," She had said one night in his room as she rubbed her eyes, "You know I would have loved this kind of thing back at home, all this philosophy and shit… but it's too real here. No one else seems to realize it though." She stopped and looked at him, the grim and weary expression she fought so hard against during the day claiming her eyes. It was a few moments before she began again, "I guess it really comes down to Lind L. Taylor. People argue whether it was right or not for Kira to kill him but no one is horrified enough to realize that he was just a puppet for L and for you. He wasn't even a game piece. L set a man up to be killed on national television and you killed him, and no one seems to care. I'm the only one who seems to be able to remember his name at all."

Ryuk was fascinated by her. It wasn't quite the regard he had for Light, whom he regarded as a kind of trickster or entertainer, but he still found her a great distraction from eternity. They never really spoke much to each other, but sometimes their eyes would meet, and Light would always wonder what secret thoughts passed between the two of them. The secrets of the universe, of universes beyond his own, all the twistings and turnings of the worlds that had brought them to him could have travelled through their gaze.

It was almost tiring; the constant noise of his name being called and the silence from his two shadows. Sometimes he would sit and leave the notebook untouched (now hidden more safely in an incinerating trap) and simply sit and listen to the cars on the street beneath his window. Even aspiring gods needed a break every once in a while.

And so time moved on in the death of criminals, the lies of Anna Jones, and his own carefully crafted words. It was an interlude, one of many to come, in which he could reflect and think before the game swept him off his feet once more. But the game was a hungry thing and soon enough it acted and with ravenous jaws it smiled as it knocked upon his door.

He had thought it might be Ryuk who would alert him to the next move with a grin and a laugh. Ryuk was probably waiting for the right moment to push Light back into the role of Kira. Instead his first warning of L's next move came from the girl who called herself Anna Jones.

She stood outside beside the barren trees waiting for him with a quiet intensity. She was staring behind her as she waited for him with a quiet intensity that she usually didn't have at school. As he approached her she continued to stare back her eyes narrowed without even a casual word or two that she would normally spare for him.

Before he could ask what she was staring at she looked at him and said in a rather dry tone, "You know I think my secret illiteracy is becoming less of a secret; if the magical voodoo god that messed with my brain in order to translate doesn't show up I may be thrown out of high school."

He couldn't help but smile. Anna Jones and her battle with the language barrier was an ongoing thing. He had to put it to her, she did try. Whenever he came across her in the house she was always with a dictionary and a stack of papers to write on soon enough she would progress to children's book, for having been trapped in a country whose language she didn't even really hear for only a few weeks she was doing remarkably well. Still, the school was starting to get suspicious of her 'stage fright' that prevented her from writing anything on the board, or anywhere else, in class.

He shook his head and said, "If your voodoo god does show up please let me know, I'd love to have a little chat with him."

Here her eyebrows raised and said, "Hey now, let's not be sexist who says voodoo god isn't a woman or a sexless blob?"

And then sometimes she said things like that. He felt that being Kira he should be above being floored by conversation with his future subjects but at the same time how the hell was he supposed to respond to the idea of his enemy, the god of Anna Jones voyage to his world, being a blob. She had been doing it with increasing frequency since the Lind L. Taylor incident, it wasn't quite what he had expected from the persona he dubbed 'Anna Jones' but it wasn't the quiet very careful girl he had gotten to know in her moments of panic. She had too many faces for comfort and like him she seemed to switch between them effortlessly hardly noticing the difference.

They had been walking for some time when her eyes drifted to their reflections in a few shop windows a frown appearing on her face. Finally she said in even measures, "Light, consider this an act of good faith. Don't stop walking when I say this either but wait to look at a sign or something and then you'll know. There's a man trailing you."

(How odd it seemed, that all it took to change roles was a few simple words spoken in quiet desperation and suppressed guilt.)

He stopped a few moments later by an advertisement on a shop window, there was indeed an extra set of footsteps. They walked the rest of the way in relative silence, their bodies puppets while their minds drifted elsewhere. It was only behind his locked door that they finally talked.

He stood out of sight by the window watching the silhouette of the man in the blue coat with narrowed eyes, it had taken L long enough but it looked as if he had finally decided to confront the rat in the police. He couldn't see his face from this angle but he wasn't desperate yet, besides a face would get him nowhere, he needed a name as well. The girl spoke even while he looked out the window.

"You know that I'm not on your side." She began solemnly, "It must be fairly obvious that I'm not a… supporter of Kira. You're ruthless; you'd kill your family if you felt you had to. Soichiro, even Sayu, you'd burn them all alive if you felt you had to." She said this as if it was written in stone, an irrefutable fact, and he wondered if that should please him or not. In her eyes he saw himself reflected, not a man but a fire, something that burned and blazed regardless of what was thrown in for fuel.

Her eyes moved past him to the window where the man waited outside, waited for Light to slip and the games to begin, "People to you are nothing; we're game pieces, convenient or inconvenient baubles that can be brushed aside with little effort and even less remorse. To you we are only our usefulness, the moment we outlive those uses you find ways to make us disappear." She then trailed off as if thinking on her words before shaking her head and continuing again.

She pointed toward the window her eyes taking on a harder cast than they had in the past, "I'm on their side, the side of all the inconvenient baubles who knew too little and too much. Lind L. Taylor should not have died on national television, even you know that." She laughed bitterly and shook her head even as a sad smile made its way onto her face, "You said we needed to change, that Lind L. Taylor could not happen again. That man out there is another Lind L. Taylor, just standing around waiting to die."

Light smiled coldly then, "Are you attempting to instruct me in my own field, Anna?"

"You asked for my opinion. Are you changing your mind? Think what you want, Light, but that man isn't an obstacle he's a temptation. What will you gain from his death?"

"There is always the possibility that I could slip." He said, "I would rather have him out of the way than hovering over my shoulder watching my every step."

She interrupted harshly, "It will only get worse if you do kill him. You think it's bad just because one guy is standing outside your window? He doesn't see anything! He sees your illusion, the brilliant high-school student who leads a perfectly ordinary life! To kill him you'll need his name, and I do know Light that you can get his name, but you can't kill them all without somehow differentiating him. And for what? What will he die for?" She held out her hand to the window as if she held the man's life on a silver platter before him.

"It was a risk he was willing to take when he decided to work for L." Light said calmly.

"No Light, I'll tell you what he'll die for. He'll die for nothing. Not for L, not even for you, because in the end L will use his death to narrow down the suspects. There will be cameras all over your house all because you couldn't be patient and you just had to beat L at his game." She put her head into her hands and drew shaking fingers through her hair. She looked as if she wanted to scream but instead was forced to grit her teeth in silence and take the blows as they came.

He realized then that he pitied her. He did not extend his sympathy or any warm feeling but her certainly pitied her. She was very young, perhaps younger than even he was, after all she had never told him her true age. There were times when she would fold into herself and he could see how very close she was to breaking and yet she screamed anyway. She was his own Cassandra, screaming at the top of her lungs while Troy burned away into shadows and dust. But pity was not a kindness and in the end it would change nothing, it would only cast her in a slightly more pathetic light.

His thoughts returned to L's crony waiting outside his window with seemingly infinite patience. He didn't like it, his very presence made Light nervous as if the spotlight had irreversibly turned to him and the true narrowing down of suspects had begun. Still, the girl was right in one respect, getting rid of him was going to be difficult. He hadn't thought of how to dispose of the man yet and if he asked she was unlikely to tell him details. And did he want her to anyway? Did he want her dictating his own future thoughts back to him? Or perhaps the Light of her world was different from him after all, less fluid, perhaps his errors were not Light's errors. (And yet Lind L. Taylor had died so terribly easily on television, it had not even crossed Light's mind to still his pen, to sit and think and simply wait…)

He walked toward her judging her serious expression, an act, how much was an act? There was no doubt she could act when she put in the effort. No, not just that she could act, but that she was very talented at it. She was almost as good as him. In public, in the house, everywhere else she was a grinning, odd, and adventurous girl who just happened to be in Japan during the debut of the Kira case. To the outside world she was his friend, waiting for him every day after school by the entrance to walk home, eating with him at lunch, and planning group outings with his friends. If she could maintain that façade so well in public then what did she manage to hide from him even now?

"You sympathize more with L than you do with me. Why on earth should I believe you?"

She drew her head out of her hands and looked at him with a curiously empty expression. Her eyes had frozen over and whatever emotion had formed the tempest inside them had gone leaving only a jagged ruthlessness, "I will not watch Lind L. Taylor die again. You asked for my advice, so take it or leave it, but I want you to remember when this is all over that I warned you that it would be a mistake to kill him."

"How do you know I won't find a different plan, one which eliminates my stalker but does not trigger L's attention." Light said with raised eyebrows, "I may come from a printed page but I can be quite flexible if the situation allows."

She continued to look at him with those grim jagged blue eyes and said coldly, "Maybe, maybe you will find some way, but I'll say this. There are things here beyond your control. Killing him is far more trouble than it's worth and say you do think long hours into the night. It may still be the same plan, you'll never really know. Lind L. Taylor still died, even after I had told you his name."

Yes, there it was wasn't it? Lind L. Taylor, how could such an unimportant man come to bear so much weight in their lives? Much more than when he was living, certainly. To him it was his mistake, glaring proof of his fallibility, and proof of forces beyond his control. That heart attack highlighted her knowledge, his own thoughts and actions listed before him so easily within reach. Lind L. Taylor made him afraid, he would dream of himself in the future attempting to think in a way that had not been written out for him and then reading the book to find that it had been self-fulfilling prophecy. For her it was the guilt of allowing a man to die, of standing by the side and watching as Kira did what he must. Useless, wasted death; in their own way they both longed to be rid of it.

She did look like a prophet that night, her eyes a cold fire sweeping through his future leaving nothing untouched, no stone unturned, and all the while that same fire burning through her and beyond her until it was almost blinding. In that moment she and Ryuk were mirror images, each turned to him with alien expressions showing him the threads that tied them together.

"Get out." He said softly, and her eyes still burned through him and beyond him until even he could see the ashes of his own future, "I said get out."

She stood and without a glance behind her she unlocked the door and left.

* * *

There had almost been no decision. It was as if she had already made up her mind the day Lind L. Taylor died and was only going through the motions of thinking until the time came again. She had already decided the moment she laid eyes on the poor bastard.

She had been expecting Raye Penber for some time. She had never been a Death Note fanatic, fan girls tended to scare the shit out of her, but she had known the plot very well. After L died got a little fuzzy but before then she was confident she could name every major event to occur. She knew the order of events, even vaguely the timing, but she didn't know the exact dates. After Lind L. Taylor appeared Light began to toy with the police and eventually L sent FBI agents to watch various families of agents.

She saw him the first night. She had gone out for a walk in the neighborhood when she saw him. It was beginning to become a slight ritual with her, getting out of the house, walking alone where no one would look for the truth or the lies in her. She could be no one then, a faceless stranger, a lost little girl among the street-lamps and houses. The illusion of freedom, it was so terribly beautiful, and yet even so she couldn't shake the fact that even in the illusion she wandered alone.

On her way out she didn't notice, it was only on the way back that she caught him loitering almost inconspicuously against the wall reading a newspaper as he did so. If she hadn't been looking she may never have seen him.

It was the next day that she stole Ryuk's thunder and informed Light of his situation. Now she was sitting on the couch attempting to plot nervously while she waited for Light to make his decision. She had done all she could for now, he would either believe her or he wouldn't. There was not much more she could do.

He had said they needed to change, Lind L. Taylor had been a slap in his face, he knew that something was wrong. He couldn't trust anyone else but damn if he couldn't trust himself either. He had allowed his temper to get the best of him and because of it he had been humiliated on national television. He may not trust her but he hadn't thrown her out of the room immediately either, he had listened to her argument. Of course he could have just been hiding, perhaps she overstepped her boundaries and he was planning on how to rid himself of her and Raye Penber at the same time.

She couldn't live like that though, not again, she would not watch Lind L. Taylor die again. That was why she was here, that was her purpose, to save the pawns in the great game that was Death Note. She didn't think she'd save them all, she wasn't deluded, hell she didn't even know if he would kill her for this but she would try. If this worked Raye Penber would survive, the other FBI agents would survive, he would never even meet Naomi Misora…

"Heya,"

She lifted her eyes to see Ryuk floating in front of her with his usual grin. She looked around to find Sayu and Sachiko absent. She'd only seen Soichiro once or twice and even then he hadn't really paid much attention to her. He'd only nodded once or twice and stared tiredly down at his food. The poor man, he had such hard years ahead.

After checking again that the room was empty and that no one would think she was hallucinating she began to talk, "Shouldn't you be plotting with Light?"

Ryuk shrugged, "He's too busy thinking to start muttering yet. Besides we never talk."

It was true. She and Ryuk hardly spoke to each other. She supposed it was because for one reason or another they had both come to play similar roles in Light's life. They were silent and invisible spectators to Kira's great circus. They just thought of the show in different terms, she watched an absurd tragedy, he watched the best shit he had ever seen since humans invented arson.

"No, you're right, we don't talk." She said when the moments dragged on and he continued to stand there leering at her in his rather creepy inhuman manner. She had almost gotten used to Ryuk. He had been much less terrifying in the manga and the anime, he had just been there, but in real life he put any boogey man to shame. Whenever they were in class her eyes would drift to Light and to his seven foot tall shadow, they looked like death.

The moments wore on and eventually she asked, "So, do you have anything you want to ask?"

The shinigami laughed, damn that was unnerving, she had to fight from shuddering, "You're different from Light, he's more entertaining than you but you're not exactly boring either."

"Thank you?" Different from Light was good at least however entertaining in Ryuk's book usually meant insane and ruthless and she wasn't quite sure she wanted those qualities.

Ryuk continued, "I wish you'd let him kill the cop, he'd come up with something fantastic too."

"You think he won't?" She asked abruptly her eyes flashing.

"Do you?"

"I don't know…" She trailed off and then leaned back to regard Ryuk, "If he doesn't are you expecting me to entertain you in his stead? I'll tell you now that I don't have Light's flare for extensive plotting."

Light was right, her improvisational acting skills had improved beyond recognition, only Anna Jones could sound so passé when talking to a shinigami about 'entertainment'. She was so tired of being terrified, it was leaking out of her, she looked fatigued. There were shadows under her eyes, her smiles even when she tried always looked a little grim, and she fell too easily back into this plotting.

"You already are entertaining. He still doesn't know what to do with you, talks about it all the time, when he's not talking about L or becoming God that is. No one knows what you're gonna do next, it's almost worth it when you foil his plans."

"I have yet to foil any plans." She said critically, "And besides, let's not call it foiling, I do enjoy being alive you know and I don't think people who interfere with Light's plans live long afterward."

"He's considering it though." Ryuk said.

How many gold stars would that get her? She raised her eye brows dubiously at Ryuk and sighed her feet still tapping. Considering it, that meant nothing, absolutely nothing. She had to take it one step at a time though, either he'd say yes or he'd say no and until then she had to sit and wait.

She frowned, somehow she doubted Ryuk had come just to chat about her rather minimal influence on Light's decisions. "What are you really doing here?"

And how it grinned then, so terribly, saying words more damning than any others she had known, "Always an ulterior motive? Eh, kid? I guess you could say I'm curious. Light's always ranting about what you might know and might not know and I'm starting to wonder to."

She looked at Ryuk critically, though her heart had begun to stutter and said in a quiet voice, "I will not become any less entertaining Ryuk if I happen to know more than you think I should."

Ryuk laughed, "Oh are you worried about dying again? You are paranoid aren't you?"

It said something that even through her terror of dying by the hands of a serial killer and his grim reaper she still managed to be somewhat insulted by his amused and patronizing tone. Seriously, did these people not appreciate that she appreciated the danger she was in?

"Yes I'm worried about dying again!" She whispered harshly knowing that shouting would only bring Light down from his room and that was the last thing she wanted, "I'm always worried about dying! I hate this place! I live in terror every moment that one of you might decide I'm a bit too much of a risk, too boring, too clever, too dumb, or any number of things and just get rid of me as if I was nothing! I have to be paranoid because paranoia is what is going to get me out of this alive and I will never forget it!"

And yet even as she said that she knew it was no longer true. She had changed. She could no longer live her life here as if it was something to simply be survived. She did have a duty to those poor bastards who would suffer Kira's wrath.

She could no longer live with the girl who played at being Anna Jones.

**Author's Note: And so it begins, the dangerous deviations from the plot. Thank you readers and reviewers you guys are the best.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note**


	8. Chapter 8

"_The vernacular is red shirts. I don't really know if Star Trek exists or not in this universe but it's a good term. The expendable extras that are set out to die in a story, to give it tension and weight; in other words the people we see but choose to ignore. There are a lot of them in Death Note, you never thought about them much before did you? I sure as hell didn't. Sure we say, Light's an evil murderer who must be stopped, but how many of us actually wondered where the hell Lind L. Taylor came from anyway and why he was set up on national television. I didn't, I know I didn't."_

There was something so jarring about the thought of two beings from different dimensions studying humanity by watching reality television. One, the god of death, laughing in hysterics at those whacky human antics; the other the rather confused looking orange haired American who discovered that her breach of the language barrier did not help her understand culture, all in all not what he would have described to his sister as beings from another dimension.

He watched them silently, not quite willing to notify them to his presence yet. It was easier when they focused their energies on watching game-shows and soap operas. Or was there a difference at all? Perhaps to them, when his back was turned they saw the same thing, a soap opera and a game-show. Entertaining and bewildering all at once; each audience member riveted to their seat waiting for the protagonist to take the next move. It would explain that expression he saw in their eyes every once in a while, as if they had seen this play before but still anticipated the ending; Ryuk with laughter and the girl with grim understanding.

The girl, he'd found himself thinking yet again about the girl.

Anna Jones was not stupid. This was not an opinion but rather an indisputable fact that was evident to anyone who bothered to watch her for more than five minutes. It was only when she stood beside him, standing carefully in his shadow that she began to fade into the background. When they looked at her, at them, sitting together at lunch they saw the foreign girl watching him with a bemused and utterly befuddled expression. The juxtaposition shielded her and while she would always remain 'smart' to outsiders she would never be brilliant.

He knew differently. She thought differently than he did, she was less refined, more raw, and absolutely ruthless in her pragmatism. He hesitated to use the words smart, intelligent, or even brilliant because while they all applied more or less they did not catch the essence of her thoughts. No, clever, she was very clever. She was the fox that saw the gleaming silver traps surrounding the live bait, she eyed it carefully, before carefully treading around it. Of course with that mental image there came the subsequent image of her as a coyote stuck in a trap methodically biting her own leg off for survival. The trouble was that both applied very well and sometimes it was very difficult to tell the difference.

And here she was, the omniscient prophet, watching reality television with a god of death in hysterics.

"What the hell are you doing?"

Both viewers abruptly turned their heads the girl nearly falling off the couch in shock. Clearly she hadn't been expecting him for a while and had immediately proceeded to go into panic pragmatic mode; mentally preparing herself to bite off her own leg if it meant saving herself from death.

"You come to watch with us Light?" Ryuk asked as the girl was still too horrified and speechless to say anything.

"…No." He looked down at Anna with cold eyes, "Since when do you spend time with Ryuk?"

She looked somewhat confused and looked over her shoulder at the death god and then back to Light, "Uh… I don't really… This is a new thing?"

He made his way over to the couch and sat down next to where she had collapsed. She looked up at him with terrified eyes, remaining stock still but her fingers twitching with the effort of not running and jumping out the window for cover.

"I thought you only watched soap operas." Light commented drily, his eyebrows raising slightly as he noted the television program.

She opened her mouth and closed it and then looked at the television, "…I don't really have a preference. To be honest I think your television is even worse than mine, or maybe that's just the soap operas talking…" She trailed off clearly trying to think of something, anything, to say that would tell her what the hell Light was doing lounging beside her in a chair watching reality television.

Light chose not to address her fears, "Ryuga Hideki is a particular brand of awful. I do not understand what Sayu sees in him."

Anna Jones' face twisted into a peculiar expression of complete terror combined with her normal dry expression and overall looked incredibly awkward, "It's probably the brooding and the hair. You know those brooding guys, gotta love em… Light, why are we talking?"

Light simply looked at her for a few moments. He wondered how old she really was, she'd never told him. There were times when she looked a few years younger than him, little older than a child, and that perhaps in that other world she really had been nothing but a school girl. She was wearing herself thin with the effort of preserving all her masks.

He then held out his hand to help her regain her position on the couch, she took it cautiously and continued to look at him with those fearful and curious eyes. He spoke softly, "I balanced the outcomes, it suits my purpose more if the man outside lives."

"Why?" She asked bluntly but not in an accusing tone, but rather a wondering tone, as if she believed him but could not fathom why she did.

"Because I did recognize that something must change." Light said, "And in recognizing that fact I must act on it if I am to succeed."

She watched him warily, as if appraising him for the first time, not based on her own expectations from the books she had read but from her own experiences in this reality. Through her eyes he saw himself shed his one-dimensional layers and gain more substance.

"…I didn't think you would listen to me." She said finally with a small, almost unnoticeable, smile.

"I didn't think Lind L. Taylor's death would prove such a nuisance." Light said with a wave of his hand as if dismissing the event and turned his attention to the television instead. She sat and watched him in silence, that wary, confused, and almost awed expression still on her face. Finally she, too, turned back to the television.

He almost expected her to state something obvious, blunt and defining, perhaps that she wasn't his accomplice, that she did not want or expect Kira to succeed, or that she would abandon his side for L's at the nearest and safest opportunity. She didn't though, she simply watched as a stranger won extravagant prizes by making his way through an obstacle course.

Finally she said with that familiar frankness, "Reality is a funny thing, isn't it Light?"

Looking at the television he had to agree, "I suppose it is."

* * *

There were several things she would not have predicted in her life. The major one was being sucked into the world of Death Note spontaneously without any idea of how she got there, she still hadn't gotten over that. The other was the growing suspicion that Light Yagami, Kira, was her best friend.

She'd never really had best friends before the Death Note disaster, she had good friends and friends but not _best _friends. Best friends were the people you shared your deepest darkest secrets with, the ones you had slumber parties with while you asked for advice on boys you liked and sometimes even things that actually mattered, and in her life she'd found that she just didn't have them. It hadn't really mattered or even occurred to her until now because she'd recently started suspecting that Light might fit into that category.

It'd started that night they agreed that Raye Penber should live out the life-span floating above his head. Light had started acting different around her, less like a jailor and more like a friend. He'd sit with her and Sayu and watch soap operas starring Ryuga Hideki, lounging and making disparaging comments every once in a while looking bored out of his mind but still sitting with them, and she had the nagging suspicion that this was not a deleted scene from the manga or anime and that Light didn't usually watch television with his sister. He'd also taken it upon himself to introduce her to Japanese culture that didn't come from the Terminator (she'd never really told him that despite saying "Sayonara" once the Terminator was really about robots from the future) and was taking her around Tokyo visiting various places.

She'd found herself, almost without her awareness, spending more time with Light than she ever had before. She hadn't noticed for the longest time, it had seemed natural almost, to just follow him everywhere in school and to find him in that fake home they lived in. He was the only thing that was real after all, the only anchor to her true situation, why wouldn't she follow him?

It was one day at lunch in school, sitting across from Light watching him eat a sandwich, that she realized that something had changed.

They were discussing pop-culture of all things. After the first few weeks she had finally gotten around to searching the internet (the slow, terrible, irritating internet that existed in the nineties) and had found that most of the things she was familiar with didn't actually exist. No Star Wars, no Clint Eastwood, no David Bowie, no Michael Jackson even. If she hadn't been living with a serial killer who used a magical notebook and his shinigami shadow then that alone would have convinced her she was in another universe.

She had decided to grill Light on the subject but to her disappointment he turned out to be an uninformed cad, "What do you mean you don't watch any movies? Do you seriously just sit in your room and plot all day?"

"I have better things to do than television." Light said with a shrug, biting into his sandwich and glancing at the rest of the student population, "Most normal people do."

"Do not use yourself as the model of perfect teenager, Light." She said scathingly waving her own sandwich in her face instead of an outraged finger, "We both know that doesn't work. Besides I have checked and people seem to love stupid horror films as much in this world as they do in mine."

Light shrugged as if to point out that to most people he was the perfect teenager, not a hair out of place. That was what was so frustrating, somehow in spite of eating lunch alone most days he still managed to appear normal, no not normal but popular. People flocked to him naturally, like a light on the porch that drew in the moths from miles around. They didn't seem to notice that he only talked to them sparingly about artificial things, smiled a little too much, and laughed at jokes that weren't funny. He could walk up to any one of them and ask them if they wanted to hit the town on the weekend and they would say yes without a second thought.

"Fictional stories created to escape reality don't hold much appeal to me." Light said coldly, "Seems almost defeatist in a way."

She wanted to ask him if he had always been like this or if this was just the magical notebook talking. Instead surrounded by teenagers who were blissfully unaware of Kira's presence she glared slightly and went back to eating food.

"If it offends you that much I'm sure we can rent one of your precious films." Light said offhandedly.

It was those words. As if a switch had been flipped in her mind and she knew in an instant a single truth. He would never have said that to her, to anyone, before. Not without a cheerful smile from a practiced actor or a casual dismissal that made it feel as if she hadn't just been brushed off.

He noticed her lack of response and her blank stare, "What?"

There it was again, no pretense, but blank blunt honesty. His disdain plainly evident in his eyes and posture and his words, in everything as he looked at her as if he thought she was the greatest idiot he had ever seen.

Unable to think of anything she blurted her thoughts, "You never stare at anyone else like they're an idiot."

An eyebrow raised and he smiled casually, "They tend to be less persistent in their desire to explain the merits of television and the like."

He seemed oblivious. Perhaps he didn't notice it himself but only subconsciously allowed himself to relax enough around her to display honesty, to show her a small fraction of the face behind the mask. And then she knew why. He had nothing to hide from her, no reason to, she already knew his greatest secret and he had ensured more or less that she would not be speaking it any time soon. It was more than that even, with their accord over Lind L. Taylor and Raye Penber they had reached some sort of truce, not a true one, but a slight one. He had realized that she did not have to be played like a chess piece, carefully manipulated into place, because she saw all the moves he could allow himself transparency.

Which lead to a disturbing thought, "Are we friends?"

A slight pause, as if stunned on his part, and then a single word, "No."

But they were, they really were, and it was only becoming more evident as time went on. Perhaps he hadn't realized he lied even, because Light Yagami didn't have friends, but even unwitting it was still a lie.

It was more than Light though, it was also her. She had caught herself, more than once, seeking out Light's company. Asking around the school for him, looking for him in the house, and only realizing what she was doing once she had already begun her search. When she wanted to vent philosophy, talk about anything that wasn't small talk, she always looked for him and no one else. He didn't know her name and if she was careful enough he never would but he knew her better than anyone else in this world. That thought alone was terrifying.

Thinking about her situation was exhausting, she had adopted a policy of avoiding thinking about politics (Kira) if it wasn't really necessary. Besides, any more panic thought sessions and it'd reflect in her school work and if she gave any hint of distress to the mindless public Light would kill her. No pressure, or anything. Thus she usually saved these moments of self-reflection for late at night after Light had descended into murder mode and had locked the door to his room.

She was now in one of those moments of deep reflection or rather she was procrastinating learning to read a language she had never heard or understood. Japanese, why did it have to be Japanese? If it had at least been a Romantic language or Germanic or anything that had some common base with English it would have at least been easier. She was frying her brains trying not to be illiterate and granted her vocabulary had improved massively with the effort she was putting in but it did nothing for her grammar.

Looking at her own poorly written characters (Light said she wrote like a drunkard) she contemplated her life here. She spent so much time thinking about her possible death that she hadn't really considered how she was living, those moments between plotting, and now it seemed startlingly obvious. She was one of those goddamned heroines stuck in the castle with the nasty beast; only if she came to truly love the beast he wouldn't turn into a handsome prince he'd just stay a serial killer with a god-complex. She'd always had a problem with Beauty and the Beast, too boring, too unrealistic, too predictable, and somehow through an act of god she'd managed to turn Death Note into just that.

Stuck in a castle with the villain and no one to talk to who would understand her plight, nowhere to run, and nothing at all to do with her free time other than pester him. The problem was her view of him hadn't changed she had just started gravitating toward him naturally, pulled in by that ineffable charisma of his. Why would she seek him out when she knew what he was capable of, what he was doing at this very moment? He had some power, not just over her but over everyone, a magnetic appeal that needed no word, no expression, it was in his aura. He drew people to himself without any awareness on his part.

How much longer until she was just like those girls at school? Until she was like Naomi Misora? She'd never understood how Naomi had done it, how she'd given him her name, her true name after a single conversation? She had known just as clearly as Anna Jones knew that a single mistake could cost her life, a single slip even to a stranger, even to a charming young man, but she had still done it. So intelligent, so very wary, and dead in a moment.

Why?

What had he done, said, been to make her lose in that moment?

If Naomi Misora could lose to him then so could Anna Jones. Naomi Misora had only lasted a single conversation, Raye Penber a bus ride, how long could Anna Jones last when trapped in a house with him? Sure she had an edge, she _knew_ that Light was Kira where they only saw a faceless stranger, but even so there had been others that had _known_ all along and they had still died. L had never given Light his name but somewhere in there, in the midst of their battle, he had let his guard down and died for it. Somewhere there had been a casual mistake, almost unnoticeable, that had led to his end.

She was playing a slow game now with a chess master. She had to play the friend without being the friend all the while keeping up with the menial obstacles placed in her path, each small hurdle distracting from the ultimate endgame.

But for a moment with the paper of her scribbles in front of her she saw the entire board spread in front of her, and at the other end golden eyes smiling across at her. For once she did not see imminent failure or taxing work ahead of her but rather a slow and strenuous path that she would walk, not with ease but not an unbearable one either.

It wasn't the journey of a genius, someone who thought they had all the answers, but a hard worker, who looked past the small steps and saw the horizon in the distance.

Philosophy clearly wasn't her strong suit, it'd be better if she just focused on the Japanese.

**Author's Note: Well there you have it an update. And with the update the news that the melodrama will be toned down slightly at least for the next chapter or so, there were some crazy events and plotting to get through. Thank you for reading and the reviews, reviews are greatly appreciated.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note.**


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